Remove framebuffer support with Plymouth?
Created by: polarathene
Apart from the vesa fallback issue which I am unable to test and verify on the VGA(bochs_drm) virtual graphics device due to it not permitting TTY switching and locking up during boot for some reason. I have come across the following openSUSE Plymouth bug.
This bug occurs because the DRM driver for the graphics card is not in the initrd.
Since Plymouth has opened /dev/fb0 from userspace, the driver will be unloaded, but the memory region will not be freed. Thus, the DRM driver cannot reserve all of the card's VRAM, and will error out.
The result is a system where X accesses the GPU directly using the VESA driver, and the kernel is unable to display its VTs as /dev/fb0 is already gone.
And:
I suggest dropping framebuffer support in Plymouth.
Almost nobody should see a difference: All modern x86 systems have DRM driver support as far as I can see, and newer ARM devices are also switching to it. Everybody else will still see a text splash.
Since this is not currently a ./configure option in Plymouth, I suggest simply not packaging /usr/lib64/plymouth/renderers/frame-buffer.so .
While the UEFI boot with bochs_drm locks up BIOS boots and lspci -nnk
shows that the bochs-drm kernel driver is not in use. On boot I pressed F3 and changed to Default
as plymouth.enable=0
did not seem to help, this time the bochs-drm driver was in use. Switching TTY however does not seem to work still. Tested KaOS to compare, even with vga=0x317
(Default must have done something else beyond remove this param) it boots with bochs-drm driver loaded fine and can switch TTY.
Manjaro with F3/Default boots with text, but has a moving horizontal line/progressbar all over the place, I'm not sure if that is a part of Plymouth.