Plymouth Lands Its Tighter Integration With UEFI Flicker-Free Boot Experience

[josh_walrath]

Can someone esplain to me what "flickering" means? Like, literal rapid oscillation between image and blackness? I've never had that. Is it the slower, temporary black outs? I have those.

Also, I appreciate the nod to the Outpost 2 faction.

[R41N3R]

You might have certain hardware that the UEFI is taking long to bring up, do you have CSM enabled?

CSM is disabled already. Not sure if I have any other special hardware besides a NVME drive (no SSD/HDD) and my RX480. So far I can only assume it is the fault of the Asus Uefi.

[Britoid]

These features to improve the boot process are nice, no flickering, no unnecessary mode sets and no crippled output should be the standard. But my biggest issue is that Uefi is slow as hell, my Asus mainboard needs 15 seconds, this is more that 50% of the boot time :-(

You might have certain hardware that the UEFI is taking long to bring up, do you have CSM enabled?

[frosth]

Guest yes,
from manual:

▶ Windows 8 Feature [Disabled]
Enables the supports for Windows 8 or disables for other operating systems.
Before enabling this item, make sure all installed devices & utilities (hardware &
software) should meet the Windows 8 requirements.
[Enabled]
The system will switch to UEFI mode to meet the Windows 8
requirement.
[Disabled]
Disables this function.

and:

▶ Internal GOP Configuration
Manages the onboard Graphics Output Protocol (GOP). Press <Enter> to enter
the sub-menu. This menu shows the iGFX Driver version for system information
management. This sub-menu will appear when “Windows 8 Feature” is enabled.

The speed up is probably only for warm reboot, but thats not matter.

[R41N3R]

These features to improve the boot process are nice, no flickering, no unnecessary mode sets and no crippled output should be the standard. But my biggest issue is that Uefi is slow as hell, my Asus mainboard needs 15 seconds, this is more that 50% of the boot time :-(

[Raploz]

That's amazing! That change enhances the user experience a lot! Linux distros really need to focus on the UX if they want a chance to compete for home users. No black screens, no blinking cursors and consistent UI designs are really important.

[frosth]

It almost works for me, but my old MSI uefi on 1024x768 ruined it at all.
Archlinux+plymouth-git

edit:
it's completly huged up, I had to set Windows 8/8.1 Feature in my bios and then.. it works, beautyful, simple and clean MSI logo without any single flick up to my gnome session. Time boot decreases about 50% firmware time from 6s to 3s. Excelent

[tildearrow]

Desktops that needs splash at boot are super slow compared to Xfce . You have only fsck result flashing in a clean boot, otherwise you have black screen until the Xfce desktop comes visible. From the grub it takes about 10 secs to a have working Xfce desktop. Hiding error messages with some splash is stupid. Comment stupid error messages out from the kernel source code and make bug reports.

Why do you think a splash screen is going to slow down things? It is completely independent from the DE.

And they aren't exactly "hiding" error messages, because if the boot fails or something, the console will show up as normal.

[fuzz]

Is the boot experience for legacy BIOS as good as it's going to get with plymouth?

[davidbepo]

Desktops that needs splash at boot are super slow compared to Xfce . You have only fsck result flashing in a clean boot, otherwise you have black screen until the Xfce desktop comes visible. From the grub it takes about 10 secs to a have working Xfce desktop. Hiding error messages with some splash is stupid. Comment stupid error messages out from the kernel source code and make bug reports.

manjaro with bootsplash user here, my boot time is ~15s and the bootsplash is MUCH better than just a black screen, your solution and comment is the only stupid thing here, REALLY commenting the kernel sources?