Plymouth Adds Device Rotation Support

Commits these days to Plymouth are fairly rare with this Red Hat developed project seeing its first commits of 2018 yesterday.

Plymouth doesn't seem commits too often since this Linux graphical boot system is largely in great shape, relies upon the stable DRM/KMS kennel APIs, and has largely hit feature completion for a simple graphical boot screen that is far better than the days of RHGB or alternatives. But a fair amount of new code did land yesterday in Plymouth for now supporting device rotation.

For some tablets or laptops, the LCD panel is mounted upside-down or rotated, but as of the newly-minted Linux 4.16 kernel there is detection code for this and automatic rotation of the frame-buffer console as well as exposing the panel orientation to user-space via a new property.

That code is now in Plymouth Git to be able to automatically respond to systems with a rotated display. While it's just a boot screen, it's mostly for aesthetic reasons in ensuring correct orientation for a right first impression and being less awkward if needing to type in a password for an encrypted disk, etc.