Plymouth >= 0.8.9 does not work with frame-buffer renderer
Submitted by Jonathan Rawle
Assigned to Ray Strode @halfline
Description
Created attachment 106603 plymouth log with nvidia driver
The plymouth splash screen does not function at all when the frame-buffer.so renderer is used.
I am running CentOS 7, which ships with plymouth 0.8.9, and plymouth functions correctly with the Nouveau driver, using the drm.so renderer.
However, I wish to use the proprietary "nvidia" driver. To restore the plymouth splash screen, the advice is to set a framebuffer console at boot. I set vga=0x369 and the framebuffer console worked perfectly. However, plymouth simply didn't start, and as I use an encrypted filesystem, boot would not proceed at all (I could not even enter my passphrase "blind").
I carried out some tests, log file attached. Perhaps the significant lines are:
[ply-renderer.c:250] ply_renderer_open_plugin:could not query rendering device for plugin /usr/lib64/plymouth/renderers/frame-buffer.so [./plugin.c:288] uninitialize_head:uninitializing 0x0 head [ply-renderer.c:287] ply_renderer_open:could not find suitable rendering plugin
After reading further discussions, I tried rolling back to a plymouth package from Fedora 18, based on plymouth-0.8.8. This works correctly with the frame-buffer renderer, with no further modifications.
I have seen discussions by users of Ubuntu and ArchLinux where they report rolling back to 0.8.8 restores plymouth functionality.
I had also previously tried both Fedora 18 and CentOS 7 within VirtualBox. plymouth displayed correctly with F18, but CentOS 7 was text only.
It appears whatever has changed between 0.8.8 and 0.8.9 results in plymouth being non-functional for anyone who requires the frame-buffer renderer.
Attachment 106603, "plymouth log with nvidia driver":
plymouth.log