Arch Linux

buha

Member

Registered: 2016-12-29

Posts: 1

Achieving perfectly smooth boot splash

I would like to achieve a smooth transistion from firmware to desktop with no screen flickers / blank screens.

By using (some low-end ASUS) hardware with EFI support I can have the ASUS firmware load the linux kernel directly. There is no bootloader in the process which is a good thing for what I want to achieve (GRUB2 has hardcoded messages printed all over).

I'm using plymouth-0.9.2-12 added in kernel HOOKS like below. I mention that I have no fancy GPU/drivers, just Intel with i915 module.

MODULES="ext4 i915"
HOOKS="base udev plymouth autodetect modconf block filesystems keyboard"

I create the boot entry in the EFI menu with the following command, which passes quiet splash and some other parameters to the kernel and to udev to make them shut up:

efibootmgr -d /dev/sda -p 1 -c -L "Arch Linux" -l /vmlinuz-linux -u "root=/dev/sda2 ro initrd=/initramfs-linux.img quiet loglevel=3 rd.udev.log-priority=3 splash"

WIth this setup, with gdm-plymouth enabled instead of gdm, I almost achieve what I want.
The exception is the moment immediately after the firmware, when presumably it loads the kernel - screen goes black for a while and shows a cursor blinking at top left. I suspect it's the moment when base and udev hooks are executed but I'm not sure.

Now, the question, is there a way to not have this screen flicker?

See the GIF below. Please also take note about how plymouth animation is first displayed partly executed (the Arch logo should be empty not ~half filled when the animation starts).
Link to 15s GIF with the issue

Last edited by buha (2016-12-29 19:29:18)

Rakennus

Member

Registered: 2023-07-19

Posts: 1

Re: Achieving perfectly smooth boot splash

I wan't to achieve that too. I know it's a old post, but if u still read this and found a solution I would appreciate if u would share how u did it.

headkase

Member

Registered: 2011-12-06

Posts: 1,983

Re: Achieving perfectly smooth boot splash

I wan't to achieve that too. I know it's a old post, but if u still read this and found a solution I would appreciate if u would share how u did it.

See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Silent_boot

That covers pretty-well everything that can be done.

Ferdinand

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2020-01-02

Posts: 338

Re: Achieving perfectly smooth boot splash

And maybe squeezing a few microseconds off the boot process can also help:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improv … ot_process

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