[syslinux] not sure how to get rid of white screen during boot

Douglas McClendon dmc.syslinux at cloudsession.com
Sat Feb 19 21:37:42 PST 2011


On 02/19/2011 10:12 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> A fadeout effect would be possible but would extend the boot time by as
> much, which is probably the wrong tradeoff.

0.25-0.5 seconds I would consider a useful option aesthetically.

>
> With the most recent kernels, with "quiet vga=current" the graphic
> splash can be retained during the execution of the kernel; in fact if
> the resolution is the same some video drivers can actually leave the
> image intact during the kernel transition.

Alternately if I want to go that route, I'd still very much like for the 
menu text to disappear as soon as the options/menu are no longer 
selectable/manipulable by the user.  Having it stay up on the screen for 
4 seconds I find aesthetically sub-optimal.  Optimal IMHO would also be 
having the text fade out in 0.25s, but I don't know how doable that is 
with the particular console/text system presently in use at the time.

The resolution coincidence case I don't think fits my target generalist 
LiveUSB/DVD here.  What I want is a config that gives effectively 
optimal on my 1280x800 laptop, my 1024x600 netbook, and qemu/kvm with a 
presumption of 1024x768. (and by extension hopefully a majority of 
typical LiveUSB/DVD use case hardware)

It seems like to get effectively flicker-free with vesamenu.c32, and 
current linux-kms, in the resolution mismatch sense, you need a simple 
quick fade to black.

Getting back to qemu, qemu currently does what I want if I give linux 
vga=0x317 for append.  But I want vga=current for everything else 
(assuming that works generally enough).  So I wonder if it is possible 
or generally desirable for syslinux to be able to somehow have 
conditional append statements, perhaps somehow keying off of the 
presence of some pci-id being present (is that info readily available to 
current syslinux logic?).  Or has that functionality been talked about 
before, resulting in better advice x, y, z??

-dmc




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