You can not select more than 25 topics
Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.
49 lines
2.5 KiB
49 lines
2.5 KiB
plymouth - graphical boot animation and logger
|
|
|
|
Plymouth is an application that runs very early in the boot process (even before the
|
|
root filesystem is mounted!) that provides a graphical boot animation while the boot
|
|
process happens in the background.
|
|
|
|
It is designed to work on systems with DRM modesetting drivers. The idea is
|
|
that early on in the boot process the native mode for the computer is set, plymouth
|
|
uses that mode, and that mode stays throughout the entire boot process up to and
|
|
after X starts. Ideally, the goal is to get rid of all flicker during startup.
|
|
|
|
For systems that don't have DRM mode settings drivers, plymouth falls back to
|
|
text mode.
|
|
|
|
In either text or graphics mode, the boot messages are completely occluded. After
|
|
the root file system is mounted read-write, the messages are dumped to
|
|
/var/log/boot.log. Also, the user can see the messages at any time during
|
|
boot up by hitting the escape key.
|
|
|
|
Plymouth isn't really designed to be built from source by end users. For it to work
|
|
correctly, it needs integration with the distribution. Because it starts so early,
|
|
it needs to be packed into the distribution's initial ram disk, and the distribution
|
|
needs to poke plymouth to tell it how boot is progressing.
|
|
|
|
In the scripts/ directory there is a shell script that attempts to unpack an existing
|
|
initrd, add plymouth, and pack it back up. It's not a complete solution, though, it's
|
|
more for debugging/testing and will probably only work on Fedora based systems.
|
|
|
|
plymouth ships with two binaries: /usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouthd and /usr/bin/plymouth
|
|
|
|
The first one, plymouthd, does all the heavy lifting. It logs the session and shows the
|
|
splash screen. The second one, /usr/bin/plymouth, is the control interface to plymouthd.
|
|
|
|
It supports things like plymouth --show-splash, or plymouth --ask-for-password, which
|
|
trigger the associated action in plymouthd.
|
|
|
|
plymouth supports various "splash" plugins which are analagous to screensavers, but
|
|
happen at boot time. Currently there are two graphical splash plugins: fade-in,
|
|
and spinfinity. There are also two non-graphical plugins which are for text
|
|
mode and the details view.
|
|
|
|
The graphical plugins need a logo image and background color to function.
|
|
Distributions are expected to set these up in their packages at ./configure
|
|
time, but there are some placeholder values set up if ./configure doesn't get
|
|
those options.
|
|
|
|
Plymouth isn't done yet. It's still under active development and isn't ready for
|
|
distros to use as-is. That should change in the near future though.
|