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

[phoronix]

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

The recent release of Fedora 29 the long-desired goal of a flicker-free boot experience to the Linux desktop was finally achieved... Well, assuming you are for now using Intel graphics and set a couple extra settings and don't have any quirky hardware. While all of the key components are in place, for Fedora 30 and beyond they will likely be taking care of the "rough edges" and already there is work on a new Plymouth boot theme for pairing with this flicker-free boot process...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-Flicker-Free-Plymouth

[tildearrow]

YES! I wanted to talk about this.

OK, so a week ago I tried patching GRUB with some of the Fedora patches to try to get flicker-free black-screen-free boot working on Arch Linux, but for some reason GRUB *still* sets the screen to black, despite not having to show anything else at all (when it shall stay light gray (this is a Mac))...

Update: on my main computer the patches work flawlessly and my MSI logo stays for longer, so it seems like a Mac EFI bug/misbehavior...

[Britoid]

I'm glad this is a thing, but it's much later than other OSs which have it, although I it's finally now possible by the move to Wayland/KMS.

[perpetually high]

Oh c'mon, a little flicker never hurt anyone!

https://gfycat.com/silverfrailcrocodileskink

I counted 6 flickers in 10 seconds from POST to my desktop. (who's got me beat?!)

Maybe I'm alone on this but I like to see what's going on before it gets to the desktop, not some boring splash screen.

[NotMine999]

No flickers at on running Debian "testing" with systemd and LXDE on an old Haswell i5 CPU.

Yes, there are a few more seconds of black screen delay after some Debian updates for 2 to 3 weeks ago, but no flicker at 1920x1080 resolution.

[Slithery]

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.

[Jabberwocky]

I guess feature parity is important to some, but I just never switch my devices off.

[davidbepo]

i prefer the manjaro bootsplash

[perpetually high]

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.

Plymouth would definitely slow things down.

Having just "quiet" in GRUB, I get:

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 10.435s (firmware) + 343ms (loader) + 1.629s (kernel) + 3.085s (userspace) = [B]15.494s[/B]
graphical.target reached after 3.080s in userspace

By adding "quiet splash", I get:

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 10.481s (firmware) + 342ms (loader) + 1.631s (kernel) + 21.415s (userspace) = [B]33.871s[/B]
graphical.target reached after 21.408s in userspace
$ systemd-analyze blame|head -n 2
[B]20.537s plymouth-quit-wait.service[/B]
2.072s NetworkManager-wait-online.service

So in my case, I see zero reason to use the splash screen.

On a cold boot with just "quiet":

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 17.518s (firmware) + 344ms (loader) + 1.629s (kernel) + 3.002s (userspace) = [B]22.496s[/B]
graphical.target reached after 2.999s in userspace

Even more time in firmware (as opposed to just a reboot on the first one).

Before switching to RAID0, I was getting 10-11s in systemd-analyze. It's spending a lot of time in firmware now, not sure if I can improve that. There's about a few seconds of black screen before I see POST (when the video I posted starts), so it doesn't really bother me too much. Still boots pretty quickly and RAID0 is awesome otherwise.

[AsuMagic]

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.

If available on your motherboard (I have a MSI too), try the following thins:

• Set USB emulation to AUTO.
• Enable "MSI Fast Boot" or, if not available, "Windows 8 feature" (and disable Secure Boot).
• Disable BIOS CSM.

I personally have:

Startup finished in 6.598s (firmware) + 173ms (loader) + 346ms (kernel) + 27.487s (initrd) + 1.262s (userspace) = 35.868s

Initrd is much faster than it appears, it just happens to include the decrypt prompt.