AMD To Enable Seamless Boot Across Modern Radeon Graphics Hardware

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD To Enable Seamless Boot Across Modern Radeon Graphics Hardware

The past two years AMD's AMDGPU Linux kernel driver has supported Seamless Boot on Van Gogh APUs notably used by Valve's Steam Deck. AMD Seamless Boot is for a seamless or flicker-free boot experience by aiming to avoid redundant/unnecessary mode-sets by the driver. After a few years being limited in its scope of supported hardware, new patches are aiming to open up Seamless Boot usage to more AMD Radeon graphics hardware...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-More-Seamless-Boot

[slagiewka]

YES!

I didn't know this was a thing, but now I want it

[ntropy]

This is great ! I actually experienced that on devices by Tuxedo Computers before. My actual tux goes black one time, but then vendor logo and spinner continue up to sddm.

[markg85]

Hasn't this been a thing for - literal - decades now?
Wasn't "Plymouth" the one supposed to solve it in the old days?
I don't know if it does or if it's even still a living project.

I am surprised that this "seamless boot" just keeps returning as "feature" every so often. Apparently a very persistent issue with still no generic cross-gpu solution for it else it wouldn't be re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-resolved time and time again.

[slalomsk8er]

Yes, I remember in my Gentoo days to play with all sorts of Kernel, GRUB and Plymouth settings to archive this holy grail.

[Mthw]

Maybe I just can't read but which generations of gpus are currently supported?

[V1tol]

Maybe I just can't read but which generations of gpus are currently supported?

RX6000+ and similar

[Adarion]

I also thought that this "flicker free boot" was a thing back in the days when KMS was introduced. However, I do have mode changes anyway from 80x25 or something at early boot to desktop resolution. Important is, that I can always see and follow the boot process (e.g. I like to see init / openrc etc. running and I do not want splash screens which obstruct what is actually going on).

[Azurael]

I'm so confused by why this is a big deal or why anybody felt the need to go to such effort for a spinner and OS logo for a boot process which lasts mere seconds on any modern hardware. I've had 'seamless boot' using UEFI + systemd-boot for years at this point. It displays the firmware logo from power on, once the system has POSTed, it continues to display the firmware logo for the 5 seconds or so it takes the kernel to boot and GDM to initialise, then it gets replaced with the GDM greeter.

[Vistaus]

My boot with AMD hardware is already flicker-free and transitions seamlessly from GRUB to Plymouth to SDDM, so I don't understand what this is supposed to do. Or does openSUSE already ship these patches?