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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon balena-os

Disable/deactivate plymouth on headless or when an application takes ownership of the framebuffer

Open ZubairLK opened this issue 6 years ago • 6 comments

While investigating #1390 and #1396 , we found that plymouthd via plymouth-start.service is always running, eats quite a bit of memory(~10mb) and cpu on weaker devices such as the pi0.

Investigate

  • a different splash daemon
  • any compile time config options that can reduce its usage
  • any way we can kill plymouthd and not have always running. Perhaps configurable in case it is still needed to keep the logo up all the time etc.

ZubairLK avatar Feb 22 '19 11:02 ZubairLK

Couldn't find an easy alternative. psplash exists. But it compiles the splash logo in the binary itself. We can't really use that easily.

I do notice one thing. raspbian lite runs plymouth-quit.service to quit the daemon. almost the last systemd service before multi-user.target. That kills the daemon. We do ship that service. It is marked enabled but remains dead/inactive.

root@62d0b9a:~# systemctl status plymouth-quit
● plymouth-quit.service - Terminate Plymouth Boot Screen
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/plymouth-quit.service; static; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)
root@62d0b9a:~#

which leads to this. https://github.com/balena-os/meta-balena/commit/e32029ceafc274470628d6bd767844f797ca0653 We'd like the boot splash to remain until the application takes over..

a) have some mechanism for headless boards to enable the plymouth-quit.service to reduce memory/resource. (or disable plymouth entirely. its headless.. b) have some mechanism so that when an application takes over the framebuffer, plymouth is killed off.

ZubairLK avatar Mar 08 '19 11:03 ZubairLK

Can't seem to find any lightweight alternative to plymouth that reads the logo at runtime. psplash is lightweight but the png is built into the binary during the build.

ZubairLK avatar Mar 25 '19 14:03 ZubairLK

Related: https://jel.ly.fish/40e4e59d-a29e-4ba2-8fd2-3c74715af0d1

floion avatar May 28 '20 12:05 floion

Reference reads:

  • https://blogs.gnome.org/halfline/2009/11/28/plymouth-%E2%9F%B6-x-transition/
  • https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/plymouth/plymouth/-/merge_requests/28

alexgg avatar Jun 03 '20 09:06 alexgg

[jakogut] This issue has attached support thread https://jel.ly.fish/b1dd2ce2-1a3f-4809-b9bc-b821fa7b9073

jellyfish-bot avatar Nov 11 '21 00:11 jellyfish-bot

[alexgg] This has attached https://jel.ly.fish/0a0010f0-b909-48f9-a52d-80392ea34bb8

jellyfish-bot avatar Sep 05 '22 11:09 jellyfish-bot