Fedora Perfecting Their Flicker-Free Boot Experience With A New Plymouth Theme

[perpetually high]

What are you guys doing differently that your systemd-analyze is showing initrd?

[Slithery]

What are you guys doing differently that your systemd-analyze is showing initrd?

I'm not sure but I'm about to try getting rid of mine altogether along with the bootloader and build a custom slimmed-down kernel. In my situation though it's starting to become a case of ever diminishing returns for too much effort as by that point my firmware will be taking >90% of the boot time anyway.

[tildearrow]

No flickers here at all here with a 2700X, MSi B450M Mortar, Samsung 970 Pro, RX580 and systemd-boot running stock Arch packages. In fact I'm pretty sure that plymouth would just slow things down.

What would really make a difference would be for manufacturers to optimize their UEFI firmware implementations...

root@grey:~# systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 14.903s (firmware) + 33ms (loader) + 1.363s (kernel) + 1.509s (initrd) + 1.209s (userspace) = 19.017s
graphical.target reached after 1.209s in userspace

I'm tempted to see if it's any faster in BIOS emulation mode which would also have the benefit of a simpler partitioning scheme, although I'm not sure if the experience would still be flicker-free.

By "no flicker" do you mean just no modesets, or no black/terminal screens at all?

[Slithery]

By "no flicker" do you mean just no modesets, or no black/terminal screens at all?

No modesets, but a brief black screen between the firmware and my herbstluftwm background appearing. The rest of the boot is completely silent...

root@grey:~# cat /proc/cmdline
initrd=\initramfs-linux.img root=LABEL=root rw quiet loglevel=3 rd.systemd.show_status=auto rd.udev.log_priority=3 vt.global_cursor_default=0

Now if anyone can tell me how to fade in the background that would be fantastic - currently just using feh but willing to change if I need to.

[jacob]

I'm admittedly ignorant in the field of graphics drivers, so take this as the naive question it probably is, but why in the world is flicker free boot such a difficult problem? Windows has had it since XP, MacOS had it ever since it existed, so why do Linux OSes have such a hard time doing the same thing?

[AsuMagic]

What are you guys doing differently that your systemd-analyze is showing initrd?

Having systemd as an initrd. You can configure this in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf on arch linux for example.

[Luke]

What I'd like to get is this: I use my desktop background for a grub background and a plymouth background, and on encrypted machines use autologin so there are not two passphrase prompts. Ideal would be to replace the firmware's "vendor logo" with that desktop image, transition without a flicker into the GRUB menu if used or else directly to the plymouth background, with the plymouth passphrase box then coming up. After the correct passphrase, transition from plymouth to X the way it used to work (on almost ANY hardware so long as only one screen) back in the Ubuntu Lucid Lynx era. Get that to work even if more than one monitor is connected so long as the secondary monitor is disabled at startup.

[polarathene]

Enable "MSI Fast Boot" or, if not available, "Windows 8 feature" (and disable Secure Boot).

Some motherboards like my ASRock one also have UltraFastBoot for slightly faster FastBoot...at the cost of locking yourself out of BIOS(no keyboard shortcut or BIOS vendor logo flash, doesn't need to init as much or something. You can use a command via CLI to reboot into UEFI if you need to. Sometimes bit dangerous though, but perhaps not as bad as when I disabled some USB feature I didn't think was needed based on the description, which prevented mouse/keyboard from working unless I had a PS/2 one around(or took out the CMOS battery to reset BIOS I guess).

[polarathene]

encrypted machines use autologin so there are not two passphrase prompts ... with the plymouth passphrase box then coming up. After the correct passphrase,

Is there a way to input password from EFI variable on laptops that have that fingerprint login for windows? I assume the fingerprint is stored in an EFI var at boot.

[Zeioth]

This is pretty neat. I want it on my Antergos.