New plymouth theme for flickerfree boot
As discussed in my previous blog post one of my TODO list items for plymouth is creating a new plymouth theme.
Since the transition to plymouth is not entirely smooth plymouth by default will wait 5 seconds (counted from starting the kernel) before showing itself so that on systems which boot under 5 seconds it never shows. As can be seen in this video, this leads to a very non-smooth experience when the boot takes say 7 seconds as plymouth then only shows briefly, leading to a kinda "flash" effect while it briefly shows.
Another problem with the 5 second wait, is now that we do not show GRUB the user is looking at the firmware's bootsplash for not only the often long firmware initialization time, but also for the 5 seconds plymouth waits on top, making it look as if nothing is happening.
To fix this I've been working on a new plymouth theme which draws a spinner over the firmware boot splash, eliminating the ugly transition from the firmware boot splash to plymouth. This also allows removing the show-delay, so that we provide feedback that something is happening as soon as plymouth starts.
Firmware being firmware getting this done right was somewhat harder then I expected, but I've a first "draft" of a new theme doing this now. I've created some videos showing 2 different systems booting the new theme:
I've built a test version of plymouth for Fedora 29, to give this a try download all rpm files from here except the .src.rpm and -devel files and then from a directory with all those files in it, run:
sudo rpm -Uvh plymouth*.rpm
Since plymouth is part of your initrd, you also need to regenerate your initrd:
sudo dracut -f /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
This regenerates the initrd for the kernel you are currently running, so if you've installed a kernel update and have not rebooted since then you may not get the new theme when rebooting. In this case rerun the dracut command after rebooting.
Note if you've previously followed my instructions to test flickerfree boot, then you need to remove "plymouth.splash_delay=20" from your kernel commandline, since we now no longer want to have a splash-delay.
Now reboot and you should get the new spinner on firmware-boot-splash theme, with Fedora branding.
If you give this a try and the new theme somehow does not look correct, please mail at [email protected]. If you mail me about the theme not displaying correctly please attach the /run/plymouth.log file which this test-build generates to the email and a video of how the theme misbehaves would be great too.
I still need to discuss the idea of using a new theme incorporating the firmware boot splash with the GNOME design team so this is all subject to change.
Since the transition to plymouth is not entirely smooth plymouth by default will wait 5 seconds (counted from starting the kernel) before showing itself so that on systems which boot under 5 seconds it never shows. As can be seen in this video, this leads to a very non-smooth experience when the boot takes say 7 seconds as plymouth then only shows briefly, leading to a kinda "flash" effect while it briefly shows.
Another problem with the 5 second wait, is now that we do not show GRUB the user is looking at the firmware's bootsplash for not only the often long firmware initialization time, but also for the 5 seconds plymouth waits on top, making it look as if nothing is happening.
To fix this I've been working on a new plymouth theme which draws a spinner over the firmware boot splash, eliminating the ugly transition from the firmware boot splash to plymouth. This also allows removing the show-delay, so that we provide feedback that something is happening as soon as plymouth starts.
Firmware being firmware getting this done right was somewhat harder then I expected, but I've a first "draft" of a new theme doing this now. I've created some videos showing 2 different systems booting the new theme:
- My workstation booting, plain version of the theme
- My workstation booting, Fedora branded version of the theme
- My laptop with diskcrypt booting, plain version of the theme
- My laptop with diskcrypt booting, Fedora branded version of the theme
I've built a test version of plymouth for Fedora 29, to give this a try download all rpm files from here except the .src.rpm and -devel files and then from a directory with all those files in it, run:
sudo rpm -Uvh plymouth*.rpm
Since plymouth is part of your initrd, you also need to regenerate your initrd:
sudo dracut -f /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
This regenerates the initrd for the kernel you are currently running, so if you've installed a kernel update and have not rebooted since then you may not get the new theme when rebooting. In this case rerun the dracut command after rebooting.
Note if you've previously followed my instructions to test flickerfree boot, then you need to remove "plymouth.splash_delay=20" from your kernel commandline, since we now no longer want to have a splash-delay.
Now reboot and you should get the new spinner on firmware-boot-splash theme, with Fedora branding.
If you give this a try and the new theme somehow does not look correct, please mail at [email protected]. If you mail me about the theme not displaying correctly please attach the /run/plymouth.log file which this test-build generates to the email and a video of how the theme misbehaves would be great too.
I still need to discuss the idea of using a new theme incorporating the firmware boot splash with the GNOME design team so this is all subject to change.