Plymouth not showing selected splash theme on boot

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1

Hello everyone.
The default theme that came with fedora worked fine but I decided to remove the rhgb quiet from grub configuration since I liked it better. Later I stumbled upon this repo with plymouth themes and wanted to try them out.

I added back the rhgb quiet keywords to grub configuration and rebuilt it. After that I first wanted to try out the other preinstalled themes so I switched to one (I also made sure it is installed beforehand)

sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -R spinner

I rebooted my system but I only saw a grey background with three dots appear instead of the splash theme. I tried different themes but with the same result (even the bgrt theme which I believe is the default).

The repo I mentioned had a link to arch wiki so I tried some things listed in there. I created /etc/dracut.conf.d/myflags.conf file and added add_dracutmodules+=" plymouth " to it. Didn’t help. I tried replacing rhgb with splash in the grub configuration and even having both splash rhgb at one time but the result was the same.

I though maybe the themes were broken so I tried installing the angular theme from the aforementioned repo. During this I also followed the instructions for debian based distros rather than arch based with the exception of update-initamfs for which I used dracut --force instead.

To my surprise when I was rebooting the theme actually showed up but my happiness didn’t last long because when booting the grey background with three dots appeared again.

I tried looking at systemctl status of quit-wait and start plymouth services since that’s what chatgpt suggested.

systemctl status plymouth-start.service 
â—Ź plymouth-start.service - Show Plymouth Boot Screen
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/plymouth-start.service; static)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf
     Active: active (exited) since Mon 2024-08-19 15:22:47 CEST; 57min left
   Main PID: 356 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
        CPU: 875ms

srp 19 15:22:47 Fegura systemd[1]: Starting plymouth-start.service - Show Plymouth Boot Screen...
srp 19 15:22:47 Fegura systemd[1]: Started plymouth-start.service - Show Plymouth Boot Screen.

systemctl status plymouth-quit-wait.service 
â—Ź plymouth-quit-wait.service - Hold until boot process finishes up
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/plymouth-quit-wait.service; static)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf
     Active: active (exited) since Mon 2024-08-19 13:23:19 CEST; 1h 1min ago
    Process: 1126 ExecStart=/usr/bin/plymouth --wait (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 1126 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
        CPU: 8ms

srp 19 13:23:09 Fegura systemd[1]: Starting plymouth-quit-wait.service - Hold until boot process finishes up...
srp 19 13:23:19 Fegura systemd[1]: Finished plymouth-quit-wait.service - Hold until boot process finishes up.

I tried looking at boot logs to see if something went wrong with plymouth but I didn’t see anything bad.

ChatGPT also suggested to look for errors in boot messages.

sudo dmesg | grep plymouth
[   15.880411] systemd[1]: systemd-ask-password-console.path - Dispatch Password Requests to Console Directory Watch was skipped because of an unmet condition check (ConditionPathExists=!/run/plymouth/pid).
[   16.029469] systemd[1]: plymouth-switch-root.service: Deactivated successfully.
[   16.029705] systemd[1]: Stopped plymouth-switch-root.service - Plymouth switch root service.

So yeah, I don’t know what to do. I can see the splash when shutting down but not when booting.
Here’s my specs.

OS: Fedora Linux 40 (Workstation Edition) x86_64
Host: 80XV (Lenovo ideapad 320-15AST)
Kernel: Linux 6.10.4-200.fc40.x86_64
Uptime: 1 hour, 18 mins
Packages: 2810 (rpm), 8 (flatpak)
Shell: bash 5.2.26
Display (BOE0729): 1920x1080 @ 60 Hz in 15″ [Built-in] *
Display (AOC 24"): 1920x1080 @ 120 Hz in 24″ [External]
DE: GNOME 46.4
WM: Mutter (Wayland)
WM Theme: Adwaita
Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3/4]
Icons: Adwaita [GTK2/3/4]
Font: Cantarell (11pt) [GTK2/3/4]
Cursor: Adwaita (24px)
Terminal: GNOME Terminal 3.50.1
Terminal Font: Source Code Pro (10pt)
CPU: AMD A6-9220 RADEON R4, 5 COMPUTE CORES 2C+3G (2) @ 2,50 GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon R4 Graphics [Integrated]
Memory: 3,95 GiB / 14,52 GiB (27%)
Swap: 0 B / 24,00 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 18,34 GiB / 47,93 GiB (38%) - ext4
Disk (/home): 150,30 GiB / 653,37 GiB (23%) - ext4
Local IP (enp2s0): 192.168.0.104/24
Battery: 62% [AC Connected]
Locale: cs_CZ.UTF-8
2

Removed flatpak, Site Help & Feedback, wayland

3

The plymouth configuration only takes effect if you rebuild the initrd. You can run

sudo dracut -f

The reason is that plymouth is started before the disk units has become available.

1 Like
4

The -f option is the same as --force which I tried. Also plymouth-set-default-theme -R should also rebuild the initrd as far as I know.

5

Can you also post:
lspci | grep -i -E 'vga' | cut -b1-7 | xargs -i lspci -vnnks {}

and
cat /proc/cmdline

Thanks

6

lspci | grep -i -E 'vga' | cut -b1-7 | xargs -i lspci -vnnks {}:

00:01.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Stoney [Radeon R2/R3/R4/R5 Graphics] [1002:98e4] (rev ea) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
	Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:39f9]
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 33
	Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
	Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=8M]
	I/O ports at 2000 [size=256]
	Memory at f0e00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
	Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
	Kernel modules: amdgpu

cat /proc/cmdline:

BOOT_IMAGE=(hd0,gpt7)/vmlinuz-6.10.4-200.fc40.x86_64 root=UUID=e37e7e9e-dead-4675-ac4f-75f4a35cb68c ro resume=UUID=8a410b23-bf40-427e-bff6-8eebbf1c3628 rhgb quiet