Red Hat's Plymouth Lands Udev Support

Plymouth, the Linux boot-splash software widely used by distributions when booting the system and using DRM/KMS for drawing to the screen, finally has some new activity to report.

Plymouth was attention-drawing five years ago when it first premiered in Fedora as another Red Hat open-source contribution, but a boot-splash project can only go so far and still keep drawing attention. Plymouth is now widely used by many Linux distributions and has killed off RHGB, Splashy, and other boot-splash projects.

There hasn't been much to report on with Plymouth in a number of months since the project is now in a mature state, but today there was a new branch merge. udev support has landed in Plymouth.

The work commited by Red Hat's Ray Strode and based on work done by Kevin Murphy allows for Plymouth to query udev for determining the DRM devices on the system so that Plymouth's boot-splash drawing is done to the correct /dev/dri/card* position. Some machines up to now haven't worked with Plymouth since it was trying to access the incorrect interface. As part of the udev branch merge, there's been some code reorganization, parts of the code being refactored for easier reading, and the removal of old tests.

Look for the updated Plymouth to appear in Linux distributions in 2014. Other changes to Plymouth have varied in scope but some of the more notable changes in the past few months since the previous release have been a contact plug-in, tiling support in ply-image, tiled background image support, watermark support, and various bug-fixes.