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?
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.
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.
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 )