Re: flicker free booting

[Bill Gatliff <bgat@billgatliff.com>]

Robert Schwebel wrote:
>   
>> The question I've been looking at is: do sub-second boot times make
>> all this a moot point? After all, if you can bring up your graphics
>> driver in a fraction of a second and use *it* to display a splash
>> screen, it seems like it would meet your need to give almost immediate
>> feedback to users that the system is alive.
>>     
>
> Yup, that would be cool.
>
> However, on flash-based systems in the ARM926 / 200...400 MHz class
> (which is still quite common) the boot time up to the point where the
> penguin appears is still about 3...4 s [1] which is too long. So I
> suspect until systems become faster, we'll have no other choice than
> such as scenario.
>   

Could your bootloader pre-initialize the graphics hardware to the same 
mode that the Linux driver will ultimately select, and then throw up a 
static graphic?  That would give you some output until the driver itself 
comes online.

And if the driver was in a demand-loaded module, then the static image 
wouldn't disappear until just before the application that does the 
animation was ready to start drawing.



b.g.

-- 
Bill Gatliff
bgat@billgatliff.com