SUSE Dropping Mainline Work On Their In-Kernel Bootsplash System

For those that were excited over the months of ongoing work by SUSE to bring up an in-kernel boot splash system that could be better than Plymouth for at least some use-cases and was interesting many readers, unfortunately it's not panning out for mainline.

Max Staudt who has been leading this project has sent out his latest version of the patches today, but he's decided to drop pursuing it for mainline. The German Linux developer commented, "found that it doesn't currently make sense to continue working on the splash code, given the low practical interest I've received on LKML...I'll be happy to rebase it and continue to work on it if interest arises."

In particular, several upstream Linux kernel developers expressed apprehension over this code since the bootsplash system was targeting FBCON/FBDEV interfaces rather than the modern DRM/KMS APIs. Max Staudt has his reasonings for FB over DRM/KMS, but given the lack of interest, the project is being suspended for now.

Perhaps we'll see this picked up by SUSE/openSUSE or renewed upstream interest in the future, but for now here are the last patches. The hope of this new system is that it would work earlier in the boot phase than Plymouth, allow for completely hiding the kernel output when desired, and other benefits particularly for embedded use-cases.