Hi, I've just pushed everything needed for a new boot animation for 12.1.0, it will arrive in the next build.
The old olpc-bootanim system was barely working in F17, mostly due to the move to systemd. As the init sequence is no longer linear (it includes a lot of parallelization) it would be hard to say how to fix olpc-bootanim - the key issue is that calculating progress through boot is now far from trivial. The new animation is based on plymouth, which is the tool used by Fedora. This means that we'll no longer have to put up with olpc-bootanim breaking each cycle, we now use what upstream uses. plymouth does have a solution to the progress problem, but it is overcomplicated. It works something like this: it takes the amount of time needed for the last few system startups, averages it, and computes progress-of-the-moment based on the timing and the events that systemd sends during boot. It also applies functions to these calculations so that the progress movement is smooth, rather than jumpy. The new theme I've (quickly) implemented doesn't bother showing progress - it just shows a flashing dot, and then three dots when the bootup process is finishing. We do have the option of adding a progress display later, but I personally prefer the simplistic approach. Plymouth's progress calculation is pretty good but is not always reliable, and it the amount of calculation and smoothing needed seems wasteful - it is important that our boot animation is lightweight so that we don't drain system resources. However, maybe my simple blinking-dot design could be prettified a little, without losing simplicity. Please give it a spin and share your opinion here. I will now focus on some other tasks but can revisit this at a later date. Here's the code: http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/dsd/plymouth-theme-olpc/ http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/dsd/plymouth-plugin-olpc/ The last time I seriously looked at plymouth for the XO was in 2009, and I don't think anyone has done so since then. In 2009 we noted that it produced a significant boot delay on XO-1, so thats why rejected it. Since then, it has improved enormously in that it doesn't redraw the whole screen on every frame change (which was dragging us down a lot), and also, our theme is considerably less complex (less screen updates) than plymouth's normal ones. I have also studied the codebase and code structure and I have a good understanding of it, enough to say that the design is OK and that it should not increase boot time unacceptably like before (or if it does, the bug is embedded in the design). We can examine the performance impact in the coming weeks. Thanks, Daniel _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
