Plymouth Lands Its Tighter Integration With UEFI Flicker-Free Boot Experience

The Fedora-led effort for perfecting the flicker-free Linux boot experience has landed its Plymouth boot splash screen changes for reusing the UEFI boot/logo screen during the boot process.

Red Hat's Hans de Goede has merged into the Plymouth graphical boot system support for the ACPI BGRT extension, which is an ACPI table that indicates where the UEFI firmware drew the system/motherboard logo at initialization time... Plymouth is now re-using that initial system power-on screen as part of the Linux boot process to provide a very smooth and seamless boot experience.

With the code merged to Plymouth is support for figuring that initial logo/power-on screen via ACPI BGRT on UEFI systems and support for using that as a background by Plymouth themes. In the case of Fedora, it looks quite elegant and they have Plymouth rendering a spinner on top of that for indicating the boot process until hitting the GNOME GDM log-in screen.

Hopefully other Linux desktop distributions will also be working on leveraging these upstream open-source components for enhancing their boot experience too.