[Splashy-devel] splashy initramfs support

[Luis M]

Hello Pat,

On 2/27/06, Pat Suwalski <pats at xandros.com> wrote:
> Luis M wrote:
> > Did you do that using the same method I used? Take a look at the
> > "initramfs" directory in the trunk.
>
> Turns out we're not putting it in our initrd. We're just showing a
> static image until splashy loads when the root filesystem is loaded.
> It's only for about two seconds anyway.

Well, since initramfs creates a read-only drive at boot (or at least
the splashy named pipe can't be written), splashy will just launch and
wait (statically). Then when the rc scripts kick in, the first one
kills the old splashy (started from initramfs) and starts another one
that does the progressbar.

This happens with a really fast "flick" (in my system). There might be
a better way of doing that though... i'm all ears.

> We create the device nodes pretty much the same way, but the rest is
> initramfs-dependent.
>
> There doesn't seem to be a good way to do this with initrd.

dunno about that. You mean you take care of creating /dev/fb kinda
like in the same way that splashy's initramfs hook works?

> You also seem to parse the command-line for "vga=", which is not
> correct. One of our internal patches is to make splashy not complain
> about that. When using LILO, you can never have "vga=" in the
> commandline. It is not possible.

yes, i'm aware of LILO. I put that warning there because a lot of
people install splashy from debian packages and expect it to work
without them doing anything to get it to work. We had the code in
place to update grub's menu.lst for them, but this is against the
debian policy. We need at least a debconf question posted to users
about whether splashy should update the boot loader config file, and
another question to which bootloader (or autodetect that somehow by
reading from the mbr? dunno).

I believe we can remove that warning now. submit your patch (the lilo
relevant stuff) to me and i'll remove it from the svn repo. we don't
want to be grub-only. (In fact, Jacobo has done all the lilo
investigations so far. He got good at figuring out how LILO sets the
framebuffer by writing directly to the video memory portion of the
kernel -- or is the the BIOS?).

In any case, somebody who's well versed in debconf should submit us a
way to ask users (once and store the answer, or everytime) about
whether to update the bootloader so that splashy works, and then go
from there to do things according to the bootloader specifications. in
grub, append="". in lilo, put the vga= line outside of the append=""
stuff.

Let me know what you think.

--
----)(-----
Luis Mondesi
System Administrator
Kiskeyix.org

"We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and
you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on" --
Steve Jobs in an interview for MacWorld Magazine 2004-Feb

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