[Splashy-devel] splashy initramfs support

[Pat Suwalski]

Luis M wrote:
> But, why have splashy running if there is no video framebuffer? I
> guess is better to check whether /dev/fb exists and if not exit
> cleanly.

Because as a distribution, it has to be on automatically. There can't be 
any mucking around with mkinitrd, none of our users know what it is or 
that it even exists. Whether it's loaded or not is nice to have 
determined at run time.

There is also the case where a boot menu option exists to not have the 
splash screen or any vga mode for that matter. Again, it's nice to not 
have to modify init scripts and mkinitrds and ISO boot scripts for this 
case.

It's not that the current method is bad, it's more that the current 
message is alarming/confusing.

> The reason i added the /proc/cmdline warning was to help newbies get
> splashy working by printing a hint to the terminal.

I can understand the reason, but here's another one:

If I have an i810 chip, which does not work with vesa_fb under any 
circumstances (needs video memory allocated/mapped) and I don't want to 
recompile the kernel, I can't specify vga= or else vesafb will always 
ask for a mode that works. The mode automatically changes when i810fb is 
loaded.

OT: i810-fb really sucks. It needs agpgart, intel-agp, etc. 6 modules. 
Crazy.