Rationale: New user sees undecipherable terminal spam. Considers OS as broken, scary, unprofessional, or all of the above.

Just pitching an idea here, but what about adding a boot splash? Using Plymouth or some other boot splash software. That would be awesome and silence the boot as well :)

I was very confused with these ACPI messages

Please hide kvm: disabled by bios as well.

In T2833#49349, @Vistaus wrote:

Just pitching an idea here, but what about adding a boot splash? Using Plymouth or some other boot splash software. That would be awesome and silence the boot as well :)

Plymouth isn't an option here imo. Is good for hiding all the stuff behind,but will waste ~3s of the boot time. Look at Windows,boot splash are to keep people happy while booting itself takes minutes ;)

In T2833#49910, @Thisuu wrote:

Plymouth isn't an option here imo. Is good for hiding all the stuff behind,but will waste ~3s of the boot time. Look at Windows,boot splash are to keep people happy while booting itself takes minutes ;)

But at least it would probably look dope.

In T2833#49910, @Thisuu wrote:

...
Look at Windows,boot splash are to keep people happy while booting itself takes minutes ;)

And they do it because people in general prefer being happy while waiting then having to wait 3 seconds less,
if the time with 3 seconds more is more enjoyable they will eat those 3 secs extra like cake! In general people
remember bad experiences better then good ones so the bad one in a shorter amount of time might take on
a bigger negative life in a persons thoughts so it feels like longer still even thought it was 3 seconds less.

We can't have it both ways, since you want to present Solus as a OS and not some other Linux distro on the block I think you should
also give the casual user what he wants and the hardcore people will not switch over to another OS cause of 3 seconds
boot time, they probably won't have to (re)boot that often anyway.

You can always keep it out from your own Solus Dev Build (if you have that) if you hate those 3 seconds that passionately.

Also make it extremely good, it can become a real trademark for your brand! Look at the iconic Windows or OSX bootups.
It might even help people sway over. Simply cause people want to use what is hip and cool. And a black screen a short
amount of time does not scream hip and cool.

Plymouth is off topic and was already discussed

We're not adding a boot / splash screen. Not really sure why such an off-topic discussion is happening on this task. Let's move the discussion back to the actual task at hand, thank you.

I removed your comment because you were giving a fellow user a hard time. You're doing it again, thus removing again. The conversation was already had regarding Plymouth, I suggest the focus remain on the initial TODOs and other ideas that wouldn't degrade boot times.

Latest comment removed for violation of our Community Guidelines. Further commenting of such type will result in a ban.

This is a bug not a discussion :P Not sure why this is going as derailed as this is. It's for me to track a bug. I'm not adding a splash at this moment because it *seriously* regresses boot times and causes VT switch failures.
When I'm ready to add a splash, I'll create a bug about it :)

BTW while I'm weighing on the splash thing - I'll say one last bit here and then open a new bug:

Adding Plymouth also drastically increases the size of the initrd, taking it up in excess of 30MB. The only way to keep it small then is to use XZ compression, which *further* impacts boot time negatively. On the live ISO this is exponentially slower.
Plus it takes up more room on the ESP, making upgrades that bit more risky for those using a small ESP (something we're going to address with the next installer version)

So in summary:

Cons:

• Seriously regressed boot times
• Increased footprint of OS
• Risk to ESP from overcommiting
• Live ISO even more slow to boot
• Risk of OOM in VMs from unpacking large initrd
• Restricted to an XZ initrd as lz4 doesn't work with GRUB2 correctly
• VT switch failures in conjunction with LightDM

Pros:

• Shiny.
• Better experience in general (password entry for LUKS)

Right now the cons far outweigh the pros, so I'm open to it, just not in the context of a silent boot bug which is unrelated. We'll create a new task to track the research and potential alternatives for a bootsplash implementation.

I'm using LUKS and after enter password it still shows a few messages about systemd-fsck for just a second or less. Is this normal or could it be hidden too?

Also currently using a second hard-drive with ntfs format, but isn't mounted by default.

Recent activities was emptied so as this is close, I'm posting this just just to let it appear again.

I still see messages about systemd-fsck. Maybe because I installed Solus Mate 2017.01.01.0 and now I'm on the latest version.

I did a clean install of the latest release and have them too, so don't think it's either due to Luks

I can confirm that it is not entirely silent. I also did a clean install of the latest release without Luks.

Not sure why it was closed still lol - i know we made it noisier

Since the update of today the boot is only black screen, I think it's slient now :P

Yes I also noticed a very clean black screen with just a blinking vertical line like this --> |
Silent boot is finally silent. Thanks! :)

Edit: It's a blinking underscore like this --> _

@ikey can this be closed now ?

I still get some messages during boot or shutdown: watchdog did not sleep.

When I shutdown I get this message: "Reboot: Power off", and on boot up, after entering pass to decrypt (FDE) I see some blue messages. After last kernel update, I'm not seeing the fsck messages.

As it was not yet explicitly mentioned, I'll add that (only after upgrading a newly installed system), right before the Luks passphrase prompt, there's a message saying:

[    3.393395] dracut-initqueue[241]: Failed to start systemd-cryptsetup@luksx123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123.service: Unit systemd-cryptsetup@luksx123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123x123.service not found.

Also, with regards to the rationale given out by @ikey, the Luks passphrase mentions a long alphanumerical code again, which makes it span two lines instead of just one. And instead of showing a colon and space (: ) as the prompt, it shows an exclamation mark and space (! ) which I've seen lead at least one non-technical user to believe that the system was broken and could not be booted. Not sure if it's feasible to patch Luks, but it would sure be nice.

If that could be done, and the only text on screen would be something like...

Please enter passphrase: _

... then I for one would actually prefer that, and a lower boot time, to some shiny bling Plymouth screen.

I confirm. I have lots of nasty noise on my LUKS password prompt... looks like shit has hit the fan.

Urrr.... it's not that bad.

1. It's normal.
2. I mean, this issue isn't resolved yet so should be pretty obvious that you're still gonna get the messages :P

@Faults Comment removed. Please keep your language appropriate here. Thanks =)

Instead of Plymouth, a simple Solus ASCII art would look nice :)

Apparently there's work on new splashscreen method, maybe it will be faster than Plymouth: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SUSE-Kernel-Bootsplash