Plymouth 0.9.4 Boot Splash Released, First Update In A Year & Adds DRM Preferred Mode

Plymouth 0.9.4 is now available as the graphical boot system widely used by most desktop Linux distributions. This update to the Red Hat led project is the first new release in 15 months and as such there are a fair amount of changes.

Plymouth 0.9.4 adds various fixes from build problems to correcting memory leaks, renderer updates, device rotation work, and several dozen other changes.

The most recent addition that seems to have motivated this Plymouth 0.9.4 release in part is now using the DRM preferred mode for the mode-set to utilize during the boot process. Plymouth when enumerating outputs would default to the current active mode, which at boot time can be a low resolution, but instead the preferred (generally native) mode is picked. At this stage the change only affects UEFI booting systems to no longer rely upon the FBCON modes. This DRM preferred mode picking is part of the Red Hat / Fedora work on the beautiful and flicker-free boot process.

With Fedora 29 on Intel systems (including HD/UHD/Iris Graphics) and setting a few extra options, it's possible to get a very pleasant boot experience thanks to the work by Red Hat's Hans de Goede and others.

More Plymouth 0.9.4 details via FreeDesktop.org.