de-uglyfying usplash, replace it with splashy/upower?

Matt Zimmerman mdz at ubuntu.com
Thu May 4 23:12:38 BST 2006


On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 08:21:51PM +0200, Sander van Loon wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-05-03 at 14:14 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 04:09:05PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > We don't use a higher resolution framebuffer because it would make
> > > suspend/resume much harder to support. If that situation changes in the 
> > > future, we'll reconsider it.
> > 
> > Right, this isn't an inherent limitation of usplash, but a tradeoff that
> > we've accepted in favour of better hardware support.
> 
> Ok, better hardware support makes sense, but isn't there a way to
> provide the best solution for everyone? Maybe X.org can detect the video
> card, and decide to use a low-res framebuffer if the videocard is not
> sufficient, and a high-res framebuffer if the videocard can handle it?
> Maybe run a test during the first boot or something with the high-res
> framebuffer, and if that test fails, use the low-res framebuffer? Maybe
> it would possible to give the user the choice to turn it on?

It doesn't have much to do with what modes the video card can handle; see
Matthew's explanation above.  My understanding is that the vga16fb driver is
the only kernel framebuffer driver which doesn't interfere with
suspend/resume.

> And if the other distro's do use the high-res framebuffer for the boot
> splash, how do they handle hardware support and suspend/resume? I find
> it hard to believe that they don't care about good hardware support.

It isn't fair to assume that they don't care, but they may have different
priorities and be willing to accept different tradeoffs.  That's why
diversity is healthy.

Some boot splashes load the full X server to do their work, and thus don't
use the fb drivers, which avoids this problem (but has other problems).

-- 
 - mdz



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