Ubuntu 19.10 To Ship With Flicker-Free Boot Support

[shmerl]

Not on Fedora 31, on a Ryzen laptop and a RX580 workstation

Laptop screens with their eDP could be different. It flickers once (and screen shows resolution change indicator) on regular monitor / DP, with Vega 56 for me.

[R41N3R]

A polished boot experience is nice, hope it works soon for amdgpu too like for Intel. But most of the time Uefi is something that is extremly slow, it works fine on some notebooks, but my Asus mainboard is terribly bad and spents almost 25 seconds until Linux can take over :-(

[lu_tze]

Not on Fedora 31, on a Ryzen laptop and a RX580 workstation

Yes, it still flickers on Fedora 30 (kernel 5.1.17) and Vega workstation. The Vega UEFI GOP doesn't support 4k (or even FHD) resolution, it switches to 1024x768 at boot. AMDGPU once initialized switches to 4k.

[rene]

Do Linux users really care that much about a little bit of flicker at the start? Of all the problems I've encountered in my life, I would rate this close to last place in priority, but maybe others see this differently?

yeah, and then this support brings you systemd hanging on some new CPUs, and lack of support of previously well working graphic cards for last years or decades machines, ... :-/

[DanL]

Coincidentally, this cycle marks ten years since Canonical initially rejected the notion of Plymouth for improving the boot experience as back in 2009 instead they wanted to just focus on a ten-second boot time.

Ironically?

[jacob]

Do Linux users really care that much about a little bit of flicker at the start? Of all the problems I've encountered in my life, I would rate this close to last place in priority, but maybe others see this differently?

Yes they do care. First impressions count.

[fkoehler]

Yes they do care. First impressions count.

Well, I work with both kinds of operating systems (Linux, Win10) and I honestly couldn't even tell you, if the Win10 boot process is flicker free. I know that the Linux boot process on my laptop is kind of tedious, because I need to enter my 20+ letters LUKS passphrase, which is 1000x more disruptive than a bit of flicker.

Once you start auditing your workflows for regulatory compliance you usually have other problems than "first impressions". So my guess is, that flicker free boot is more of a thing for enduser/consumer devices? This would be an explanation that would justify the amount of effort put into that area by de Goede / Redhat.

IMO for the Linux desktop in itself this would make no sense whatsoever.

[tildearrow]

The Vega UEFI GOP doesn't support 4k (or even FHD) resolution, it switches to 1024x768 at boot. AMDGPU once initialized switches to 4k.

It does support 4K. My GRUB menu appears in 4K with a Vega card.
Maybe your motherboard is limiting it to 1024x768 (in the case of MSI motherboards it's the WHQL option that enables 4K).

[Teggs]

I watched a laptop boot Windows 10 the other day.

The screen flickered, twice.

[lu_tze]

It does support 4K. My GRUB menu appears in 4K with a Vega card.
Maybe your motherboard is limiting it to 1024x768 (in the case of MSI motherboards it's the WHQL option that enables 4K).

If I replace the AMD card with Nvidia card, it does run in 4k at boot. So it is not the motherboard.

Modelist.efi helps to put the blame exactly where it belongs: https://imgur.com/E3YsfX9. Even the UEFI setup cannot switch to FHD, which it does support.