Weird boot/shutdown quirks (related to flicker-free boot)

Ask Fedora
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My system was upgraded from Fedora 29 to Fedora 30 and I noticed that flicker-free booting was a new feature coming with Fedora 30. Unfortunately, my installation has anything but a flicker-free boot. I see the UEFI splash and then I see the normal systemd output (the OK messages; bonus points to whoever can tell me what those are called) until Plymouth starts right before the LUKS password prompt. I noticed that Plymouth still had the old “charge” theme which I changed to the “spinner” theme with no change.

Is there any way I can get this flicker-free boot to work before the LUKS password prompt?

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cat /etc/default/grub

What does it say?

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Hi @jdloft! Welcome to the community! Please have a look at the introductory posts in the #start-here category if you haven’t had a chance to do so.

Have you rebuilt your initrd image after changing plymouth theme? As far as I understand, you need to in order for change to take effect.

$ sudo plymouth-set-default-theme tribar -R
Note that the -R flag will rebuild your initrd, and the next time you reboot your system, you will see the new theme in action.

Here’s more details about changing plymouth themes in a Fedora magazine article.

As far as I understand, the answer is “maybe”. A pair of quotes from Fedora FlickerFreeBoot wiki page:

Please keep in mind this is still a work in progress.

Take a machine with i915 graphics (amd/nvidia graphics will still see the monitor turn off briefly for now)

Also I can say that on my notebook with older i915 graphics and encrypted root, /home and also temp partition, the boot process is quite close to flicker-free when I reboot my machine (and I see a graphical LUKS passphrase request on after reboot), but on an initial powerup LUKS passphrase request is in text mode. I think that’s because I have my temp partition encrypted in addition to root and /home as that’s not the default. But I haven’t tried to troubleshot it.

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GRUB_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=1
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1 resume=/dev/mapper/VG1SSD-SWAP rd.lvm.lv=VG1SSD/F29-ROOT rd.luks.uuid=luks-9567d6d6-64ce-4628-a61e-e08269b07973 rd.lvm.lv=VG1SSD/SWAP rhgb quiet"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=/dev/mapper/VG1SSD-SWAP rd.lvm.lv=VG1SSD/F29-ROOT rd.luks.uuid=luks-9567d6d6-64ce-4628-a61e-e08269b07973 rd.lvm.lv=VG1SSD/SWAP rhgb quiet"
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"
GRUB_ENABLE_BLSCFG=true

I sometimes enable the Nvidia drivers but they have no effect on this.

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Yes, initrd has been rebuilt. I can see that the theme does change but still doesn’t start before the LUKS prompt.

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You need to either comment out this string, or change it to “gfxterm” instead of console. It’ll help a bit.

From the quote I’ve provided I read that you can’t have flicker-free boot on NVidia hardware regardless of drivers. Both nouveau and proprietary drivers need some work in order to make flicker-free boot possible, as far as I understand.

Just out of curiousity: is this identical for both initial startup (from powered off system) and for reboot/restart? I’m asking because I saw a difference in my case – wrote about it above )

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