Hi, On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 11:44 AM Max Staudt <mstaudt@xxxxxxx> wrote: > It'd be nice to see this bug fixed, as it happens only occasionally (as is the nature of a > race condition), and was thus really hard to debug. I'm sure it can drive people insane, > as they try to find out whether they've disabled Ctrl-Alt-Fx in their xorg.conf, but really > it's Plymouth getting the system into a bad state. I probably owe a bald patch on my > head to this bug. Okay, reading through the code I do see how what you're describing could happen. I sketched out a patch here: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/plymouth/commit/?h=fix-vt-management-on-deactivate&id=0b5b790d628f4c96e3ab9fbc0daba67a29b850da that I think should fix it. I need to do some testing with it (ideally rig up a reproducer) before I push it. > This is exactly where the kernel bootsplash is useful. Since it starts even before any > userspace program is loaded, it can close this gap. > > I've even tried it in combination with Plymouth: Plymouth is just another graphical > application, so it simply pops up "on top", just like X would. The two splashes > integrate flawlessly. I just wish it used our modern graphics platform instead of the deprecated subsystem. > One could argue that one could put all DRM drivers into the initrd. Ubuntu does this, > and the initrd is ~40 MB in size. Not nice. well, that 40mb isn't just graphics drivers... ╎❯ du -sh /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/gpu 2.7M /lib/modules/4.14.6-300.fc27.x86_64/kernel/drivers/gpu 3M isn't too awful. But really you have two choices as I see it: 1) make the initrd support new hardware 2) make the initrd be taylored to a specific configuration. I actually think ubuntu has it right by doing 1. it's going to give the best user experience. (not just with graphics but other new hardware too). But if you do 2) then it's not unreasonable if things break with new hardware. Now ideally, the breakage would be as isolated as possible. I mean maybe it's okay if the boot splash breaks (or shows a text splash), but it's not okay if the bootsplash sort of works using /dev/fb, but then causes Xorg to break. So we should probably change plymouth to avoid falling back to /dev/fb in the case where new hardware got added. Could probably fix this by detecting if kms is around when the initrd is generated, and adding a config option to skip fb renderer in that case. or something like that. But the easy answer is to just fix the initrd to have the graphics drivers. > And even then, the initrd could be outdated for some reason. Maybe it's a developer > machine. Nobody would expect the boot to hang/fail because of this problem. Right, ideally boot splash problems should never stop boot from proceeding. > So let's take SUSE. They don't have a finishing transition, the splash simply stops > and is hidden at once. Such a splash makes sense to be shown instantly, right? I don't think it makes sense for animations to lack transitions. animations without transitions look buggy or unfinished. they should fade out or finish the loop, or whatever. If it's a static image it should fade to black or the background color. (going to be away from the computer for a few days after this message so probably won't reply for a while to further discussion) --Ray _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
