Fedora 42 Boot Splash Screen Looks To Workaround GPU Drivers Taking Too Long To Load

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  • phoronix
    Administrator
    • Jan 2007
    • 67385

    Fedora 42 Boot Splash Screen Looks To Workaround GPU Drivers Taking Too Long To Load

    Phoronix: Fedora 42 Boot Splash Screen Looks To Workaround GPU Drivers Taking Too Long To Load

    Linux kernel graphics drivers have been growing too much in size that they are taking too long to load at boot time for quickly lighting up the display to present the nice Plymouth boot splash experience. This has led to situations of the Plymouth boot splash screen falling back to its simple text-based interface after timing out. As a workaround, Fedora 42 is looking to use the generic "SimpleDRM" driver during this initial boot splash screen experience to initially avoid the bulky DRM drivers...

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  • edxposed
    Senior Member
    • Jan 2023
    • 316

    #2
    relying on the EFI/VESA platform-provided frame-buffers.
    Sounds like it will blow up on arm e-shit.

    Comment

    • V1tol
      Senior Member
      • May 2016
      • 610

      #3
      Change sounds reasonable. On my machine during boot (after selecting system from bootloader) it shows vendor logo for 5 seconds, then blinks with Plymouth spinner for couple of frames and immediately switches to login screen. Compare that to Windows or macOS boot for example. That makes Plymouth useless for me and I even had to uninstall it completely.

      Comment

      • Raka555
        Junior Member
        • Nov 2018
        • 681

        #4
        Band-aid over a deeper problem ...

        Comment

        • Kjell
          Senior Member
          • Apr 2019
          • 691

          #5
          This is not a real solution

          Comment

          • Phoronos
            Senior Member
            • Mar 2024
            • 171

            #6
            Not good !! Solve the real problem instead of workarounds !!

            Comment

            • rafanelli
              Phoronix Member
              • Apr 2022
              • 60

              #7
              With Wayland we should be able to remove some flicker. While not critically important, it is nice to have modern hardware boot up flicker free with nice transitions from hardware boot logo to boot loader menu to OS start-up animation to login screen to desktop environment.

              Comment

              • skeevy420
                Senior Member
                • May 2017
                • 8670

                #8
                This is one of those issues I find rather funny due to insignificant of a time Plymouth has always needed on my systems. On my current system I get a Plymouth splash for about two seconds. It takes upwards of 30 seconds for the UEFI to do its UEFI stuff, a couple of seconds in GRUB, and if I sneeze I'll miss the Plymouth splash due to how fast my system goes from boot screen to login screen. My annoyance regarding boot times is how long AM5 UEFI takes to initialize which then makes me regret having 64GB of ram.

                Is this a general purpose distribution or kernel issue? Meaning, does their excessive boot time happen because Fedora ships multiple graphics drivers installed at the same time to make things easier or is this because of how certain servers and motherboards are setup? A bit of both perhaps?

                "GPU drivers can take a long time to load and probe all the connectors on some machines" doesn't sound like a problem that desktops or laptops will have. It sounds more like a workstation and server problem and, IMHO, those are things that should be fine-tuned by a local engineer or not even use a splash screen to begin with.

                And why should it have to probe all the connections by default? Why can't a default card, port, and display be defined to override the automagic taking so long? Why can't the slow-ass automagic be the fallback if the preconfigured default doesn't work? It's not like the average person is switching displays, cords, and cards every boot.

                Comment

                • varikonniemi
                  Senior Member
                  • Jan 2012
                  • 1102

                  #9
                  Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post
                  This is one of those issues I find rather funny due to insignificant of a time Plymouth has always needed on my systems. On my current system I get a Plymouth splash for about two seconds. It takes upwards of 30 seconds for the UEFI to do its UEFI stuff, a couple of seconds in GRUB, and if I sneeze I'll miss the Plymouth splash due to how fast my system goes from boot screen to login screen. My annoyance regarding boot times is how long AM5 UEFI takes to initialize which then makes me regret having 64GB of ram.

                  Is this a general purpose distribution or kernel issue? Meaning, does their excessive boot time happen because Fedora ships multiple graphics drivers installed at the same time to make things easier or is this because of how certain servers and motherboards are setup? A bit of both perhaps?

                  "GPU drivers can take a long time to load and probe all the connectors on some machines" doesn't sound like a problem that desktops or laptops will have. It sounds more like a workstation and server problem and, IMHO, those are things that should be fine-tuned by a local engineer or not even use a splash screen to begin with.

                  And why should it have to probe all the connections by default? Why can't a default card, port, and display be defined to override the automagic taking so long? Why can't the slow-ass automagic be the fallback if the preconfigured default doesn't work? It's not like the average person is switching displays, cords, and cards every boot.
                  It's purely a problem of the graphics drivers that cut corners instead of thinking about fast initialization being a first priority. The change fedora made might solve the immediate issue, but it's a workaround for architectural issues that should be fixed in the drivers themselves.

                  Hopefully jumping between drivers won't break flicker free boot. If it does, then it's a bug and the change should be reverted.
                  Last edited by varikonniemi; 17 January 2025, 09:35 AM.

                  Comment

                  • andyprough
                    Senior Member
                    • Feb 2012
                    • 2453

                    #10
                    Code:
                    dnf remove plymouth
                    I'm not even a dnf user and I can figure this out easier than the IBM engineers.

                    Loading a graphics stack at boot time to impress yourself with pretty images is very silly. This is literally what text interfaces are for.

                    Comment

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