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

Johannes Thumshirn
2017-12-20T11:08:15Z

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
> holding up.
>
> 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).

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

But for several other reasons we can't disable $BOOTSPLASH_IMPLEMENTATION as
we're shipping a general purpose distro and don't know on what hardware it
will be installed.

This is only my peronal view on this situation.

Byte,
Johannes
--
Johannes Thumshirn Storage
jthumshirn@suse.de +49 911 74053 689
SUSE LINUX GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg
GF: Felix Imendörffer, Jane Smithard, Graham Norton
HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg)
Key fingerprint = EC38 9CAB C2C4 F25D 8600 D0D0 0393 969D 2D76 0850