Red Hat's Plymouth Sees New Work

Not a lot of work has gone into Red Hat's Plymouth project since the release of Fedora 10, but now in the middle of the development cycle of Fedora 11 we are seeing some new work emerge. Plymouth is a boot splash program that leverages kernel mode-setting to provide a rich, flicker-free boot experience. In the past week there have been a fair number of commits to the Plymouth Git repository, which is the first time it has seen new work since early January.

The recent work to Plymouth includes various fixes, an improved layout of the help output, and command line parsing support for the Plymouth daemon. Yesterday afternoon support was added to Plymouth for a one-time animation helper and a simple progress sequence helper, both of which will help designers and developers construct new Plymouth boot plug-ins. In fact, Plymouth has now gained a glow plug-in. This plug-in flips through a series of images until the progress reaches 90% completion, and then at that point it runs through the series of images as an animation.

This new Plymouth work -- plus more work we anticipate ahead -- will find its way into Fedora 11. Canonical will also be using Plymouth as a USplash replacement starting with Ubuntu 9.10.