FFe: enable flicker-free boot with lightdm

The linked branch implements the necessary one-liner change to the plymouth upstart jobs; hardware testing needed.

on nvidia, closed-source driver : as expected, anything better or worse, still have a lot of text printed (at random places and overwriting themselves) above the plymouth low-resolution splash.

I tested this on my X201 with Intel Arrandale, and on my Dell Mini 10 with an Intel 945, both without cryptsetup. This successfully got rid of the intermediate text screen, i. e. less boot flicker.

I tested this with the radeon driver (no cryptsetup):
 [ 1.524529] [drm] Initialized radeon 2.10.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0
and it works fine, no flickering.

And just to confirm, everyone here has lightdm configured, not gdm, right?

Yes, lightdm is used here on a Radeon HD 5500.

I tested this now with and without cryptsetup installed and noticed no difference. Flickerfree boot in both cases on my radeon system.

On my lenovo x61t (intel grapics), with out cryptsetup adding "lightdm" to the special case in /etc/init/plymouth-stop.conf fixes the plymouth to lightdm transition. Specifically there is a flixer free transition where the cursor appears over the plymouth background, however there is a significant flicker immediately afterwards when lightdm redraws the screen.

shouldn't that land for beta2 if it targets oneiric?

Hmmm, I tested this with the change to /etc/init/plymouth-stop.conf, but it makes no difference to me. I get a purple screen briefly, then several flickers with the cursor appearing a couple of times, and then I see lightdm (without ever seeing plymouth appear). But this was the case before as well...

Ok, I opened bug 853927 for that issue

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 10:34:34AM -0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> shouldn't that land for beta2 if it targets oneiric?

Yes, we should certainly try to land this before beta2, but I still need
testing from someone using nouveau.

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
<email address hidden> <email address hidden>

Just tested this on a Thinkpad T61 with nouveau.

Before the update, I get:
- Purple grub screen
- Corrupted plymouth screen
- Text mode with text
- Lightdm

After the update I get:
- Purple grub screen
- Corrupted plymouth screen
- Black screen
- Lightdm

So, looks like this is a slight improvement.

Thanks, sounds like we've got good results with all major video drivers. Handing off to the release team to consider the freeze exception.

This bug was fixed in the package plymouth - 0.8.2-2ubuntu26

---------------
plymouth (0.8.2-2ubuntu26) oneiric; urgency=low

  * Add direct dependency on ttf-dejavu-core since that's the font used in
    the initramfs-tools hook, instead of trusting that fontconfig-config
    pulls in the right alternative. LP: #828027.
  * debian/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-bottom/plymouth: /run doesn't get
    moved to ${rootmnt}/run until *after* our script has run, so don't try
    to check for it before calling plymouth update-root-fs - it's not like
    we would ever want to not pivot root, anyway. Fixes the fact that we
    haven't been getting /var/log/boot.log for months now.
  * debian/plymouth.plymouth-stop.upstart: if stopped by lightdm, let
    lightdm handle the VT transition as it's able, so we get flicker-free
    boot. LP: #849954.
 -- Steve Langasek <email address hidden> Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:56:55 -0700

For the record, I reviewed this, belatedly +1 from me.

still have some flickers.. (radeon)

fix released should read "improvement released", but launchpad doesn't have that option yet.

made some more test reboots and sometimes it gets even worse (plymouth changes resolution for no apparent reason and trows a bunch of console text in different colors..)

God i hate buggy plymouth... probably the most unpolished and buggy part of ubuntu.

manny, this bug report is about having a flicker-free transition between plymouth and lightdm. There may be other sources of flickering on some systems, but these are separate issues. Please file bug reports with 'ubuntu-bug' for the issues you're encountering.

The kinds of regressions we would see as a result of a botched flicker-free transition to lightdm would be boot-time hangs or video corruption when lightdm starts. If you're not seeing either of these kinds of problems after applying this change, I think we can still consider this change good.