Fedora 30 Flips On Intel Graphics Fastboot By Default To Enhance The Boot Experience

While Intel is finally poised to enable Fastboot by default for recent generations of their Iris/HD/UHD Graphics hardware, which could happen as soon as Linux 5.1, for now Fedora is comfortable enough enabling the support by default on their own.

Just like the upstream aim, Fedora is enabling the Intel DRM/KMS driver's Fastboot feature by default for Skylake hardware and newer as well as Valley View and Cherry Trail Atom hardware. Other generations of Intel users or those on previous Fedora releases (and other Linux distributions) can use i915.fastboot=1 to manually enable this functionality, which aims to avoid useless mode-sets during the hardware initialization process in order to provide a smoother looking Linux boot process.

The Fastboot option paired with improvements to Fedora's kernel, the Plymouth boot splash screen, and other work has yielded a flicker-free and beautiful boot experience with its initial implementation in Fedora 29. With Fedora 30 this experience should be even better with theme improvements and now having the Fastboot support flipped on, per Red Hat's Hans de Goede who has been leading this work.

Now let's cross our fingers that the Fastboot default upstream is managed for the upcoming Linux 5.1 cycle, considering how long Fastboot has been worked on for Linux going back many years.