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 (it can also use a legacy /dev/fb interface).



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.



plymouth ships with two binaries: /sbin/plymouthd and /bin/plymouth



The first one, plymouthd, does all the heavy lifting. It logs the

session and shows the splash screen. The second one, /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" themes which are analogous to

screensavers, but happen at boot time. There are several sample themes

shipped with plymouth, but most distributions that use plymouth ship

something customized for their distribution.



Plymouth isn't done yet. It's still under active development, but is

used in several popular distros already, including Fedora, Mandriva,

Ubuntu and others.  See the distributions page for more information.