[syslinux] not sure how to get rid of white screen during boot
Douglas McClendon
dmc at cloudsession.com
Sat Feb 19 15:01:02 PST 2011
I've noticed in the last roughly year, something seems to have changed
with with the syslinux/isolinux I've been using, causing there to be an
unwanted flash of pure white just at the threshold of isolinux starting
linux. I'm using vesamenu.c32, and have played around a bit with the
dozen or so color options. I half suspect perhaps this is a linux KMS
caused thing. Though one thing that makes me less(or more?) suspicious
of that is the fact that the white appears to be due to console text
background color in linux, in that I've seen the white persist exactly
to the first character of console text I see from linux, as if it is a
console text property, reset when I first output something such that
there is half a screen of white above if, then text with normal white on
black.
The easiest way (perhaps) to reproduce this, is to just download the
fedora-12 and fedora-14 i686 livecd iso images, and run them under qemu.
With f12, the first thing you see after you think isolinux is done, is
a black screen with an underline cursor in the upper left. With f14,
you get the IMHO less nice full screen flash of white. This is also
visible on hardware, e.g. my netbook, though the duration will be
subsecond versus longer than a second under qemu.
I can do more digging, but hope that someone can give me the quick
explanation off the top of their heads. I did scan the archives of the
list a few months back, and saw the comment about 'vga=keep' or
whatever, which made me think this is possibly a KMS thing, but maybe
the same way the font persists to linux, so do console text settings?
Thanks,
-dmc
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