----- Original Message -----
On Nov 8, 2016, at 11:12, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Mon, 2016-11-07 at 22:51 +0000, Micah Denn wrote: I don't know that much about plymouth and its fantastically poorly documented. I'm almost certain that it can't play that many large frames at a watchable frame rate. Although if we simplified it a bit I think most of the animation could be implemented in code, which would be much better in terms of performance.
Would the animation still look good if we did it over the gray noise background that we currently use for the login screen? The upstream designs call for that background to be used from the GRUB theme all the way to the login screen.
Then why do we opt for a generic black background for grub?
Technical reasons, not design ones.
To make it smooth, we'd need to use the exact same texture in all of grub, plymouth and gdm (easy enough) at the same resolution. Doing graphics at the grub level is likely to be slow (the RHEL grub with the logo was pretty slow last I actively tested it), and not have access to all the resolutions that the OS would.
Maybe it'd be super efficient to do for just EFI based systems, and at the right resolution, but that's hard to say without buy-in to make it happen.
From my side, it's important, but not as important as some other things to do in the boot manager side (32-bit EFI support and support for in-OS boot management, to name but 2).