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

[phoronix]

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

The Fedora-led effort for perfecting the flicker-free Linux boot experience has landed its Plymouth boot splash screen changes for reusing the UEFI boot/logo screen during the boot process...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Plymouth-ACPI-BGRT-Support

[tildearrow]

Awesome.

OK, so I found out I can't do flicker-free boot on this MacBook as it is the firmware which is setting the screen to black...

But it does partially work on my MSI machine after patching GRUB, the kernel and Plymouth. The logo stays for longer but still for some reason it goes black; and there still is the AMD modeset (when will they work on this?); and it does not set the vendor logo, despite my motherboard supporting BGRT and UseBGRT set in my Plymouth theme...

And the smooth transition feature is GDM-only so far. In the case of SDDM I still see my "Arch Freaking Linux" (yup) console login screen for 8 seconds, and then SDDM appears.

[Britoid]

So is that why Plymouth doesn't work when booting from an EFI stub?

[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?

[fuzz]

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

[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.

[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

[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.

[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 :-(

[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.