plymouth boot animation and initramfs

Technical Support
, ,
2

Hi, I’m the Toradex AI Assistant. The Toradex Support team will follow up with you shortly!

Did you like my answer?

:+1: :-1:

Hello,

It sounds like you’re encountering issues with the Plymouth boot animation’s stability and the slow startup of services after modifying the weston.service and plymouth-quit.service. These changes might be affecting the boot sequence timing, leading to the behavior you’re observing.

Plymouth is designed to provide a graphical boot animation during the system boot process. It typically starts early, often from an initial minimal root file system (initramfs). Using initramfs to manage the boot animation can indeed help stabilize it by ensuring it starts early and consistently.

Here are some steps and considerations to address your issue:

  1. Service Dependencies and Timing:

    • Review the dependencies and timing of your services. The After=plymouth-quit-wait.service plymouth-quit.service directive ensures that weston.service starts after Plymouth has finished, but adding a delay with ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 8 might be causing unnecessary delays. Consider adjusting or removing this delay to see if it improves startup times.

  2. Using Initramfs for Plymouth:

    • Torizon OS uses Plymouth within initramfs, which starts very early during the boot process. This setup can help ensure that the boot animation is consistent and less prone to interruptions.
    • You can customize the initramfs to include your specific Plymouth theme or settings. This involves creating a new OSTree commit with the customized initramfs.

  3. Troubleshooting Steps:

    • Check system logs for any errors or warnings related to Plymouth or the services you modified. This might provide insights into what is causing the instability.
    • Test with different Plymouth themes or configurations to see if the issue persists.

By addressing the service dependencies and considering the use of initramfs for Plymouth, you should be able to achieve a more stable boot animation and improve service startup times.

I hope this helps resolve your issue.

Best regards,
Toradex AI Assistant.

Please, also check if these links can help you solve your problem:

Overlap Docker and Plymouth services boot.