Re: [gentoo-user] Hanging out with fbsplash

Re: [gentoo-user] Hanging out with fbsplash

[Richard Fish]

Zac Medico wrote:

>Richard Fish wrote:
>  
>
>>Greetings list,
>>
>>I have spent most of my weekend trying to get fbsplash running on my
>>laptop.  I've managed to resolve most of the issues (getting the
>>initramfs to be recognized, starting up RAID, LVM, and encryption from
>>the initramfs, etc).  The problem I have now is that my system hangs in
>>the rc-scripts if I give a splash= option on the kernel command line. 
>>After adding a lot of 'echo' statements to the scripts, and a few
>>hundred reboots, I have narrowed it down the following command:
>>
>>    
>>
>Hi Richard,
>
>I tried but could not reproduce it.
>
>  
>

Hi Zac,

I know this is a couple of weeks old, but I just wanted to thank you for
trying it.  The problem turned out to be a kernel bug.  In case you are
curious:

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4857


>
>I suggest that you rebuild the kernel with CONFIG_FB_SPLASH=n ;-).
>  
>

So, for the record, I now have a beautiful splash screen appearing about
1 second after grub finishes loading my kernel image (which, BTW, is now
some 5MB in size!!).  I had to do a lot more work to get reliable
flipping to verbose mode to prompt for my password for my
root-on-loop-AES setup, followed by a flip back to silent mode, but it
really is beautiful to look at.

I need to write up some howto's in the next week or so, because using an
initramfs works much better than an initrd for encrypted root.

Thanks again,

-Richard

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Re: [gentoo-user] Hanging out with fbsplash

[John J. Foster]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 10:44:52PM +0200, Richard Fish wrote:
> I need to write up some howto's in the next week or so, because using an
> initramfs works much better than an initrd for encrypted root.
> 
Please, please do!

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Re: [gentoo-user] Hanging out with fbsplash

[Zac Medico]

Richard Fish wrote:
> 
> Hi Zac,
> 
> I know this is a couple of weeks old, but I just wanted to thank you for
> trying it.  The problem turned out to be a kernel bug.  In case you are
> curious:
> 
> http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4857
> 
> 

Yes, that's interesting.  Thanks

> 
>>I suggest that you rebuild the kernel with CONFIG_FB_SPLASH=n ;-).
>> 
>>
> 
> 
> So, for the record, I now have a beautiful splash screen appearing about
> 1 second after grub finishes loading my kernel image (which, BTW, is now
> some 5MB in size!!).  I had to do a lot more work to get reliable
> flipping to verbose mode to prompt for my password for my
> root-on-loop-AES setup, followed by a flip back to silent mode, but it
> really is beautiful to look at.
> 
> I need to write up some howto's in the next week or so, because using an
> initramfs works much better than an initrd for encrypted root.
> 
> Thanks again,
> 
> -Richard
> 

That sounds nice.  Do you use busybox for the root-on-loop-AES setup?  What is better about initramfs?  Do you have to compile the cpio archive into the kernel or is it just as good when you load it like an initrd?  I'm looking forward to the howto ;-).

Zac
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Re: [gentoo-user] Hanging out with fbsplash

[Richard Fish]

Zac Medico wrote:

>That sounds nice.  Do you use busybox for the root-on-loop-AES setup?  What is better about initramfs?  Do you have to compile the cpio archive into the kernel or is it just as good when you load it like an initrd?  I'm looking forward to the howto ;-).
>
>  
>

Well, I don't use busybox.  The main "problem" using an initrd with
loop-AES is that the memory used by the initrd can never be freed (I
think it can be swapped out though), and thus the reason you want to use
something small like busybox/dietlibc/klibc.  In my case, to make my
initrd small, I ended up using /bin and /lib directories on the /boot
partition to contain the majority of the programs needed by the /linuxrc
script.

But with an initramfs, you don't care as much about the memory problem,
because almost every byte of that can be reclaimed simply by rm -rf'ing
all of the files in the initramfs once you have the root filesystem
mounted and you have pivoted to it.

Thus the reason I don't use busybox...having a 10MB uncompressed
initramfs is not a problem.  I can have bash, glibc, and a bunch of
other regular utilities available before the root is mounted, and when I
am done with them, I simply delete the files and "umount -n -l" the
initramfs.

Oh, and it works either way, but I have a slight preference for
compiling the cpio into the kernel.  It keeps the init environment and
the kernel inexorably linked, and also lets me dump all ramdisk support
from my kernel config.

-Richard

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