Re: [RFC PATCH v2 00/13] Kernel based bootsplash

From: Daniel Stone
Date: Wed Dec 20 2017 - 06:22:50 EST


Hi Johannes,

On 20 December 2017 at 11:08, Johannes Thumshirn <jthumshirn@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 05:16:30PM +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
>> Ok I've realized that my assumptions about why you need this aren't
>> So from reading these patches it sounded like you want an in-kernel boot
>> splash because that would be on the display faster than a userspace one
>> like plymouth. That's the only reasons I can see for this (if there's
>> another good justification, please bring it up).
>>
>> I only know of very embedded setups (tv top boxes, in vehicle
>> entertainment) where that kind of "time to first image" really matters,
>> and those systems:
>> - have a real hw kms driver
>> - don't have fbcon or fbdev emulation enabled (except for some closed
>> source stacks that are a bit slow to adapt to the new world, and we
>> don't care about those in gfx).
>>
>> But from discussions it sounds like you very much want to use this on
>> servers, which makes 0 sense to me. On a server something like plymouth
>> should do a perfectly reasonable job.
>
> For _one_ reason we'd like to see this is (I was one of the requesters of this
> implementation), plymouth in it's infinite wisdom also grabs the serial (IPMI)
> console and escape characters in a screen log are (you can think of the rest
> of this sentence yourself I think).

You can set 'plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles' on your boot line to
disable this behaviour.

> Also plymouth grabs the escape character of HPE iLOs, which is a serious
> no-go.

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but maybe it's best addressed
as a bug report to the Plymouth developers? One of them is in this
thread.

Cheers,
Daniel