A new enhanced bootsplash

• Student: SeiyaNuta (seiya@)
• Mentor: KrisMoore (kmoore@)

I propose a new bootsplash mechanism. Currently, we can enable bootsplash by adding few options such as splash_bmp_load to /boot/loader.conf but it only displays an image file so I cannot reassure that the system works well. Therefore, I want to develop a new bootsplash mechanism which enables enhancements of attractiveness, such as progress bar. I think this will greatly improve user experience. I’m planning to implement this using src/sys/dev/fb, SYSINIT and kernel module system.

A bootsplash system follows configurations in /boot/loader.conf like this:

### bsplash start ###
# auto generated by `bsplash-create`
bsplash_image_name="/boot/splash/foo/image.bmp"
bsplash_image_load="YES"
 
bsplash_background_y_origin="0"
 
bsplash_progress_bar_y_origin="800"
bsplash_progress_bar_height="30"
bsplash_progress_bar_width="500"
 
bsplash_animation_y_origin="1100"
bsplash_animation_height="300"
bsplash_animation_width="300"
bsplash_animation_repeat="YES"
### bsplash end ###

bsplash-create loads theme.conf and generates configuration for /boot/loader.conf and generates an image just like CSS sprites.

#
#  example
#
$ ls background.bmp 
background.bmp
$ ls animation*.bmp
animation0.bmp  animation10.bmp animation12.bmp animation14.bmp animation2.bmp  animation4.bmp  animation6.bmp  animation8.bmp
animation1.bmp  animation11.bmp animation13.bmp animation15.bmp animation3.bmp  animation5.bmp  animation7.bmp  animation9.bmp
$ ls progressbar*.bmp                                                                                                                                                                                              
progressbar0.bmp        progressbar20.bmp       progressbar40.bmp       progressbar60.bmp       progressbar80.bmp
progressbar10.bmp       progressbar30.bmp       progressbar50.bmp       progressbar70.bmp       progressbar90.bmp
 
$ bsplash-create --background=background.bmp \
                 --progress-bar=progressbar%.bmp \
                 --animation=animation%.bmp \
                 --repeat-animation

• Implementation of a new bootsplash mechanism in the kernel
• scripts for creating bootsplash themes
• Example themes

• Write code in VM on VirtualBox
• make and copy generated kernel and modules to /boot
• Launch .vdi of the VM with QEMU on host OS
• Check output and dmesg

• make buildinstall on a real machine.
• boot it
• check output and dmesg

• https://svnweb.freebsd.org/socsvn/soc2014/seiya
• https://github.com/ntsy/bsplash