Plymouth Planned For Ubuntu 9.10 Integration

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Plymouth Planned For Ubuntu 9.10 Integration

Late last month we shared that Plymouth may replace USplash in Ubuntu and that this matter was to be discussed further at the Jaunty UDS. With the Ubuntu Developer Summit now over, there are a few items to note from their Plymouth discussion. Plymouth will not become the default boot screen in Ubuntu 9.04, but it's planned for integration with Ubuntu 9.10...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjkzNQ

[bulletxt]

this is really good news. With kde4 improving,kernel improving on each release, hopefully amd releasing doc, I expect year 2009 to be a real good year for Ubuntu, and generally speaking for Linux.

[shredwheat]

Is there a list of the primary reasons for delaying Plymouth? I'm guessing it was for reasonable things, like waiting for the kernel changes to settle for another 10 months.

Were there any specific showstoppers in the short term?

[DanL]

Splash screen = pointless eye candy, boot performance reduction, and possibly missing important boot messages.

[elanthis]

Is there a list of the primary reasons for delaying Plymouth? I'm guessing it was for reasonable things, like waiting for the kernel changes to settle for another 10 months.

Were there any specific showstoppers in the short term?

Mostly that it doesn't actually work on more than like 2 cards at the moment. (I'm exaggerating a little there.)

It requires at a minimum full KMS support. Fedora 10 -- which shipped Plymouth -- therefor only supported Plymouth on older ATI cards, nothing else. Ubuntu 9.04 might get Intel KMS support, but newer ATI cards support have been "sometime soon" for over half a year now, Nouveau has no clear time table, and other cards aren't likely to get KMS any time soon. Given that Ubuntu 9.04 has just four months -- including time to stabilize and test -- it would be unrealistic to hope for KMS/Plymouth to be ready by then. 9.10 gives things a lot more time to materialize and stabilize.

[shredwheat]

Splash screen = pointless eye candy, boot performance reduction, and possibly missing important boot messages.

I disagree with this entirely. I will never use nor recommend a distro that doesn't have a well implemented boot screen. Ubuntu has done a great job with usplash.

The progress bar shown on splash screens has a huge amount of value while waiting for a system to get itself together.

Boot printout contains so much information that none of it has any meaning. Any modern distro will also parallelize the boot process, scrambling the boot soup. (or buffer it, which makes it even more pointless)

[deanjo]

I disagree with this entirely. I will never use nor recommend a distro that doesn't have a well implemented boot screen. Ubuntu has done a great job with usplash.

The progress bar shown on splash screens has a huge amount of value while waiting for a system to get itself together.

Boot printout contains so much information that none of it has any meaning. Any modern distro will also parallelize the boot process, scrambling the boot soup. (or buffer it, which makes it even more pointless)

What is the huge amount of value? What does it provide you? It provides nothing useful at all. At least with a scrolling boot message you can catch stuff that has possibly failed as it scrolls by, hidden boots don't warn you of things like impeding SMART failures, raid issues, failed services, etc that may not be a showstopper, but can grow into one if not remedied. At least when you see the word failed go by you can see that you should check the logs and take preventative action before the issue escalates.

[ferreira]

I disagree with this entirely. I will never use nor recommend a distro that doesn't have a well implemented boot screen. Ubuntu has done a great job with usplash.

The progress bar shown on splash screens has a huge amount of value while waiting for a system to get itself together.

Boot printout contains so much information that none of it has any meaning. Any modern distro will also parallelize the boot process, scrambling the boot soup. (or buffer it, which makes it even more pointless)

I lol'd.
Progress bar gives you absolutely nothing - it's nice when you don't care/don't know what's going when system is booting, but in any other circumstances it's just another annoyance.
Parallelizing boot process isn't problematic - for example OpenRC prepends each line of boot output with name of the corrssponding service, so nothing is lost ;)

[Gentooer]

Yeah I've never understood why any knowledgeable linux user would want to hide all the important boot messages. Besides, with gentoo on a SSD I'm already in X in 10-15 seconds, barely enough time to turn on my monitor and sit down. I like eyecandy as much as anyone, but not when it limits usability.

[Eragon]

I suppose they will have a backup system in place which does not require KMS? I use Nvidia's binary driver, and I am not going to stop using it, since nouveau doesn't have 3d -> no gaming.

[SavageX]

I very much prefer a nice graphical boot. I absolutely don't need vast amounts of scrolling text during a normal non-failing startup. If things go wrong this obviously doesn't apply anymore and the graphical boot should fallback to a spammy output mode.

[maleadt]

I lol'd.
Progress bar gives you absolutely nothing - it's nice when you don't care/don't know what's going when system is booting, but in any other circumstances it's just another annoyance.
Parallelizing boot process isn't problematic - for example OpenRC prepends each line of boot output with name of the corrssponding service, so nothing is lost ;)

And who do we want to make Linux popular too? Unless you want Linux distributions remain to be an underdog in the OS-race, you'd have to improve the user experience, which involves boot splash enhancement. A phrase I read somewhere: "never underestimate the value of shiny".

I agree when you say that a regular linux user, which is already convinced about it's proper value, doesn't need the nice boot screen. Well, then you just need to activate the proper Plymout plugin so you can see all boot messages scrolling over your screen, in high-resolution! So as a user who prefers to see all boot messages, I'm happy to see this (KMS+Plymouth) getting developed and integrated.

[Vadi]

I'm not in favour of Plymouth either, being on nvidia's binary drivers.

Facebrowser delay on the other hand is dissapointing.

[elanthis]

I'm not in favour of Plymouth either, being on nvidia's binary drivers.

The proper attitude here would be "I'm not in favor of NVIDIA's drivers because they don't integrate with the Linux graphics stack."

I'd assume that if Plymouth and Wayland and the like take off, NVIDIA will end up making the necessary adjustments to their driver to use the KMS interface as well as any other interfaces necessary. Right now, the driver requires the X DDX driver to work at all -- if the X DDX drivers disappear entirely, that would of course make the NVIDIA driver unusable, which isn't something NVIDIA is going to want. They really do need their drivers to work on Linux because of a wide range of high-end customers that demand support, and those customers are going to end up on more modern Linux installations eventually.

[val-gaav]

I'd assume that if Plymouth and Wayland and the like take off, NVIDIA will end up making the necessary adjustments to their driver to use the KMS interface as well as any other interfaces necessary.
AFAIK they would have to open source their driver to support KMS

[maleadt]

I'd assume that if Plymouth and Wayland and the like take off, NVIDIA will end up making the necessary adjustments to their driver to use the KMS interface as well as any other interfaces necessary.

Can they? I just read:
The last time I talked to the developers working on it, they told me that the hooks necessary to implement kernel modesetting were exported to GPL modules only, and therefore are not usable by the NVIDIA driver.
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122845

[llama]

Phoronix: Plymouth Planned For Ubuntu 9.10 Integration

Late last month we shared that Plymouth may replace USplash in Ubuntu and that this matter was to be discussed further at the Jaunty UDS.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjkzNQ

:rolleyes: If you don't like your screen flickering when you boot, just remove "quiet" and "splash" from the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst, and run update-grub to re-generate the menu entries. Then you'll boot in text mode without any graphical messing around (until X starts, if you have that happen by default).

The only good idea I've seen here was using Plymouth as a way to display the boot messages more nicely. If there was a big progress bar overlaid on them, I wouldn't have a problem with that.

BTW, if you don't know what all your boot messages are about, then maybe that's because modern GNU/Linux starts so much stuff at bootup that it's harder to get started reading up on what does what on your system. In the old days, before initramfs, before devfs, before network-manager, things were simpler. When I started using GNU/Linux (> 10 years ago), there weren't so many messages, and I was fascinated by how the system worked, so I read most of them. Pretty soon I understood what they all were. As new versions of distros introduced new messages, I only had a few new messages to find out about by looking in /etc/init.d or kernel docs to see what made them.... So the boot messages make a pretty good progress bar for me, since I know what happens when my system boots. I've often seen warnings or problems in my boot messages (and I sometimes remember to fix whatever it was in /etc by the time I get to a shell... other boot messages distract me.)

Ok, if you just want to use GNU/Linux, you don't have to read/understand your boot messages. But if you want to be able to fix problems, it _really_ helps to know how your system works. I'm strongly opposed to the trend of hiding boot messages, and stuff like that. Showing the messages seems like a good way for potential new hackers to see that there is a whole layer of Unix waiting under that shiny desktop to catch their interest.

So I'm in favour of text boot messages overlayed with a progress bar as the default setup for Ubuntu. (and other distros, if they currently default to something worse like Ubuntu's current usplash progress bar).

[elanthis]

Can they? I just read:

Well, sucks to be stuck with the NVIDIA driver then, I guess. :/

Hopefully either Nouveau is finally up to snuff by then or NVIDIA sees the light. Between Intel, AMD, and Via, pretty much every other common graphics hardware either already has or soon will have fully Open Source drivers.

Nobody working on the graphics stack gives a damn about NVIDIA's driver. Quite a few of the folks involved actively want NVIDIA's driver (as well as ATI's binary driver) to drop dead. That's the facts, whether or not you agree with the sentiments.

I personally don't blame them. If we worry about what NVIDIA's driver supports, then that means that we are permanently stuck with whatever developments NVIDIA feels like putting money in to and nothing more. That's not even remotely a good place to be. (Freely replace "NVIDIA" in this paragraph with "any big corporation".)

[Vadi]

I seriously doubt any worthy distro would drop support for whatever technologies nvidia needs.

Some people actually do use high-end hardware under linux. surprise, surprise.

[elanthis]

I seriously doubt any worthy distro would drop support for whatever technologies nvidia needs.

Some people actually do use high-end hardware under linux. surprise, surprise.

Nonsense. Both Fedora and Ubuntu very regularly make releases that completely fail to support the NVIDIA driver for weeks (months, a few times), and it is absolutely NOT the fault of the distro. If X changes its driver ABI or the kernel makes an API change, neither of those distros hold back updates waiting for NVIDIA. They release, and NVIDIA users sit with their thumbs up their rear ends waiting for NVIDIA to update their driver. Same with ATI's fglrx. Most other distros do the same.

Neither Fedora nor Ubuntu (nor most other popular distros) target users who need their high-end Quadro/FireGL/whatever cards to work, and Linux as a whole does not target gamers. Again, doesn't matter if you agree or not with the decisions, those are the facts.

The only way that is EVER going to change is if NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel start releasing top-notch Open Source drivers or if the Linux graphics stack comes to an absolute stand-still.

[deanjo]

Nonsense. Both Fedora and Ubuntu very regularly make releases that completely fail to support the NVIDIA driver for weeks (months, a few times), and it is absolutely NOT the fault of the distro. If X changes its driver ABI or the kernel makes an API change, neither of those distros hold back updates waiting for NVIDIA. They release, and NVIDIA users sit with their thumbs up their rear ends waiting for NVIDIA to update their driver. Same with ATI's fglrx. Most other distros do the same.

Neither Fedora nor Ubuntu (nor most other popular distros) target users who need their high-end Quadro/FireGL/whatever cards to work, and Linux as a whole does not target gamers. Again, doesn't matter if you agree or not with the decisions, those are the facts.

The only way that is EVER going to change is if NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel start releasing top-notch Open Source drivers or if the Linux graphics stack comes to an absolute stand-still.

Well first of all people that use the high end cards for professional use, do not generally use cutting edge distro releases. They tend to go with long term support releases which are tested heavily for use with the blobs. Also while cards may not always work with alpha's and beta's of the consumer releases of a distro I can't remember a time where nvidia has not had support ready for the final release.

[Vadi]

Haven't seen a broken nvidia driver in ubuntu, sorry.

Then again I'm on it only since 7.04.

[elanthis]

Also while cards may not always work with alpha's and beta's of the consumer releases of a distro I can't remember a time where nvidia has not had support ready for the final release.

Every single Ubuntu and Fedora release that includes a new X.org has had this problem save the last, and that's only because NVIDIA put out a beta driver for them. You can search both the Ubuntu and Fedora forums for older releases that had incompatible X.org updates, and you'll see many a thread about "the NVIDIA driver doesn't work!!!?!!~~!111!!~"

I've been using both distros since their inceptions (and used Debian and Red Hat for years before they existed), and until recently I was a loyal NVIDIA customer. I've felt the pain many, many times. :)

Those updates usually had quick fixes -- a beta driver at least would be published within a week or three that includes the updated DDX ABI or kernel glue code. Now, however, we're apparently approaching a point where the new interfaces are GPL-only. Things are going to get worse for binary driver users, not better.

If you're an NVIDIA user, now is a great time to help the Nouveau folks out any way you can. :)

[DanL]

And who do we want to make Linux popular to?
Don't assume that everyone wants to grow Linux badly enough to the point where more developer effort is spent on "eye-candy" than on real functionality. Linux is currently popular enough where even stubborn companies (e.g. Creative) have to take notice of it if they don't want their support sites bombarded with angry Linux users/customers.

Pandering to n00bs is okay to some extent, if the n00bs are willing to learn, but growing the user base too fast can lead to problems, especially with an OS that has relied on experienced volunteers supporting the new users (for the most part). For example, look at the Ubuntu user forums. The ratio of the helpers to the helpless is ridiculous (I've contributed to the forums since the Feisty days).

[deanjo]

Those updates usually had quick fixes -- a beta driver at least would be published within a week or three that includes the updated DDX ABI or kernel glue code. Now, however, we're apparently approaching a point where the new interfaces are GPL-only. Things are going to get worse for binary driver users, not better.




Not necessarily, if anything nvidia has shown in the past it can easily adapt to what ever curve balls the FOSS community throws at them. If they throw a curve so outside of the strike zone all they are going to accomplish is forcing big players that use the high end stuff to switch back to a OS where that concern is no longer present. In the end the FOSS community would end up shooting them selves in the foot.

[elanthis]

In the end the FOSS community would end up shooting them selves in the foot.

Hardly. The FOSS world neither begins nor ends with the Linux kernel.

Perhaps Linux would drop off of as a leading render-farm/workstation OS, but either OpenSolaris or FreeBSD (or one of its cousins) or one of the many other FOSS OSes are far more likely to take its place than the sole remaining Big Popular Proprietary OS.

[fart_flower]

It requires at a minimum full KMS support. Fedora 10 -- which shipped Plymouth -- therefor only supported Plymouth on older ATI cards, nothing else.

While it is true that Plymouth can take advantage of KMS, it is not a requirement. My Fedora 10 install runs the animated flaring sun boot screen on an nVidia card quite well. It's not enabled by default, but it can be done relatively easily.

And chicks dig it.

[deanjo]

And chicks dig it.

Na, they just like the fact that your distracted while they go through your wallet looking for more Christmas gift money.

[fart_flower]

Na, they just like the fact that your distracted while they go through your wallet looking for more Christmas gift money.

No worries. I keep a set mouse trap stuffed in my wallet.

[Kjella]

Yeah I've never understood why any knowledgeable linux user would want to hide all the important boot messages. Besides, with gentoo on a SSD I'm already in X in 10-15 seconds, barely enough time to turn on my monitor and sit down. I like eyecandy as much as anyone, but not when it limits usability.

Personally, I think you answered your own question. Who actually manages to read that stuff anymore? Unless the boot really hangs then at the very best I'll see a red line flashing past and that's it. That is if I make it an effort to stare at the screen as it boots.

If it's in a bootable state, I'd much rather have a "Linux experienced some warnings/errors on boot. Click _here_ for details." in KDM/GDM or a systray applet after logging in. If you want to talk usability, what's less userfriendly than "Whoops, you missed it... well I'm not going to repeat myself, you'll find out on your own!"

[yesterday]

I agree with the Kjella. The fact remains that the current graphical bootup is a pretty poor implementation. If Windows or OSX had such a flicker-filled boot up we'd be mocking them. There is no reason a decent grub-to-desktop implementation cannot be flicker free, support modern resolutions, AND still allow for boot error notification. In fact I think current ubuntu usplash can be configured to be silent except under certain circumstances (fsck etc.)

[SheeEttin]

I agree with the Kjella. The fact remains that the current graphical bootup is a pretty poor implementation. If Windows or OSX had such a flicker-filled boot up we'd be mocking them. There is no reason a decent grub-to-desktop implementation cannot be flicker free, support modern resolutions, AND still allow for boot error notification. In fact I think current ubuntu usplash can be configured to be silent except under certain circumstances (fsck etc.)

Sure. Just remove the "quiet" option, but not the "splash" one. You get a "pretty" progress bar (actually, it's pretty ugly) with scrolling boot messages underneath.
At least that's the way Kubuntu works. I'd assume Ubuntu is the same, just in orange.

Also, for those who don't know, boot messages are logged on VT1, VT2, and/or VT8 while the system is booting with usplash, and I'm pretty sure you can hit scroll lock to freeze them.

[DanL]

There is no reason a decent grub-to-desktop implementation cannot be flicker free, support modern resolutions, AND still allow for boot error notification.
There is a reason: no kernel mode-setting = flicker, low resolution. ;)