Issue #3351: Change: Plymouth: Use simpledrm by default - fesco

fesco

#3351 Change: Plymouth: Use simpledrm by default

Closed: Accepted a month ago by kevin. Opened 2 months ago by amoloney.

Make plymouth use the simpledrm kernel mode setting (kms) device by
default instead of waiting for the GPU driver to initialize.

Owners, do not implement this work until the FESCo vote has explicitly ended.
The Fedora Program Manager will create a tracking bug in Bugzilla for this Change, which is your indication to proceed. See the FESCo ticket policy and the Changes policy for more information.

REMINDER: This ticket is for FESCo members to vote on the proposal. Further discussion should happen in the Discourse discussion linked above. Additional discussion may happen on the Fedora Devel mailing list.

decathorpe commented 2 months ago

~~PS: The post to the discourse discussion is wrong, it links to the libpinyin Change.~~ (FIXED)

Edited 2 months ago by decathorpe

amoloney commented 2 months ago

Thank you! I was losing my mind looking at it now trying to fix it :-D

salimma commented 2 months ago

But @jwrdegoede please see the question by @zbyszek in Discourse

jwrdegoede commented 2 months ago

But @jwrdegoede please see the question by @zbyszek in Discourse

I have answered @zbyszek's question in Discourse, for completeness here is a copy of my reply:

This proposal implies that other graphics drivers can be dropped this from the initrd. Do you plan to do this?

At this time I do not plan to drop graphics drivers from the initrd, as I mentioned in my Moving GPU drivers out of the initramfs blogpost: https://hansdegoede.dreamwidth.org/28291.html there is one issue which is considered a blocker for this:

"Secondary monitors not lit up by the efifb will stay black during full-disk encryption password entry, since the GPU drivers will now only load after switching to the encrypted root. This includes any monitors connected to the non boot GPU in dual GPU setups.

Generally speaking this is not really an issue, the secondary monitors will light up pretty quickly after the switch to the real rootfs. However when booting a docked laptop, with the lid closed and the only visible monitor(s) are connected to the non boot GPU, then the full-disk encryption password dialog will simply not be visible at all.

This is the main deal-breaker for not implementing this change."

The intent of this change is only to let plymouth use the simpledrm kernel-mode-setting /dev/dri/card# device to show the splash earlier and to avoid textmode fallback in some worst-case drm-driver init time cases.

This does bring us a step closer to actually dropping the GPU drivers from the initrd and if this goes well we could consider maybe doing that for Fedora 43, documenting some sort of workaround for the issue mentioned above.