Bug 2276698 - the plymouth tribar theme no longer displays full screen
Summary: the plymouth tribar theme no longer displays full screen
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: kernel
Version: 40
Hardware: x86_64
OS: Linux
unspecified
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Kernel Maintainer List
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2024-04-23 18:50 UTC by Bill Gianopoulos
Modified: 2024-09-19 05:49 UTC (History)
19 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
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Description Bill Gianopoulos 2024-04-23 18:50:41 UTC
i have a few older laptops with graphics that can not display the default plymouth screen on boot.  Until today wen I updated to fedora40 these worked fine with the tribar theme.  All of a sudden instead of displaying the tribar full screen it displays in a tiny window in the upper left had corner of the screen.  Is this intended behavior?

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1 Bill Gianopoulos 2024-04-24 15:29:22 UTC
Seem obvious IS NOT intended behavior.  Works fine with fedora39 not so much with fedora40 but then works with fedora41-rawhide.

Comment 2 Bill Gianopoulos 2024-04-28 17:19:41 UTC
Ignore the previous comment seems it works no better with rawhide fedora41 was actually on a different computer with different graphics.  So the issue is a few fedora versions ago the default plymouth theme with the new spinner worked and then it stopped a couple of versions ago with older AMD graphics.  so I changed to using tribar and suddenly with fedora40 that does not work either with this older AMD/ATI graphics boards.

Comment 3 Edward 2024-07-12 14:23:37 UTC
On a new install of Fedora 40 (Xfce), I noticed this as well. Tribar stays to the left side of the display. 

Although on the upgrade from the 6.8 to 6.9 kernel after the installation, Tribar is the only splash theme that will display, otherwise I see the three small blocks (which I've seen with prior Fedora releases) for all the others with graphics.

Comment 4 Hans de Goede 2024-07-12 14:43:02 UTC
> So the issue is a few fedora versions ago the default plymouth theme with the new spinner worked and then it stopped a couple of versions ago with older AMD graphics.

The older AMD graphics is likely what is key here.

The amdgpu driver is a really really big driver, which easily takes up to 10 seconds to load on older hw to pretty much do nothing after loading since older AMD GPUs use the radeon driver. This 10s delay is causing plymouth to timeout while waiting for the GPU to be initialized.

First lets verify you are indeed using the radeon driver: from a terminal under a graphical environment (so that you are sure the GPU is used) run:

lsmod | grep amdgpu

I expect this will show:

amdgpu <number1> <number2>

(and a bunch of other lines with modules which amdgpu depends on)

Where number1 is really quite big for a kernel module (17MB in my case) and number2 is the usage count.

The usage count should be 0 if your device uses the radeon driver. Likewise:

lsmod | grep radeon

should show a non 0 usage count for the radeon driver. If the amdgpu usage count is 0 and the radeon usage count is non 0, then you are indeed using the radeon driver for your GPU.

If you are using the radeon driver, then you can stop the amdgpu driver from loading by adding:

"modprobe.blacklist=amdgpu"

to your kernel commandline:

sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="modprobe.blacklist=amdgpu"

This will avoid a big delay in initializing the graphics which will hopefully fix the normal spinner / bgrt splash not showing. Note to test this you will need to reset the plymouth theme to the default bgrt theme.

Comment 5 Edward 2024-07-12 15:13:04 UTC
(In reply to Hans de Goede from comment #4)
> > So the issue is a few fedora versions ago the default plymouth theme with the new spinner worked and then it stopped a couple of versions ago with older AMD graphics.
> 
> The older AMD graphics is likely what is key here.
> 
> The amdgpu driver is a really really big driver, which easily takes up to 10
> seconds to load on older hw to pretty much do nothing after loading since
> older AMD GPUs use the radeon driver. This 10s delay is causing plymouth to
> timeout while waiting for the GPU to be initialized.

In my case:

~$ lsmod | grep amdgpu
amdgpu              17829888  0
amdxcp                 12288  1 amdgpu
drm_exec               12288  1 amdgpu
gpu_sched              65536  1 amdgpu
drm_buddy              20480  1 amdgpu
drm_ttm_helper         12288  2 amdgpu,radeon
ttm                   114688  3 amdgpu,radeon,drm_ttm_helper
video                  81920  2 amdgpu,radeon
i2c_algo_bit           20480  2 amdgpu,radeon
drm_suballoc_helper    12288  2 amdgpu,radeon
drm_display_helper    274432  2 amdgpu,radeon


~$ lsmod | grep radeon
radeon               2371584  10
drm_ttm_helper         12288  2 amdgpu,radeon
ttm                   114688  3 amdgpu,radeon,drm_ttm_helper
video                  81920  2 amdgpu,radeon
i2c_algo_bit           20480  2 amdgpu,radeon
drm_suballoc_helper    12288  2 amdgpu,radeon
drm_display_helper    274432  2 amdgpu,radeon

~$ inxi -G
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD RS780L [Radeon 3000] driver: radeon v: kernel
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.20.14 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.1 driver: X:
    loaded: radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa dri: r600 gpu: radeon
    resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: OpenGL v: 3.3 compat-v: 3.0 vendor: mesa v: 24.1.2 renderer: AMD
    RS780 (DRM 2.50.0 / 6.9.8-200.fc40.x86_64 LLVM 18.1.6)
  API: EGL Message: EGL data requires eglinfo. Check --recommends.

I will run the above grubby command. Thank you for this information.

Comment 6 Edward 2024-07-12 15:41:49 UTC
Confirming that blacklisting amdgpu worked. Now seeing the Plymouth bootsplash at bootup. Thank you again.

Comment 7 Hans de Goede 2024-07-12 15:44:37 UTC
(In reply to Edward from comment #6)
> Confirming that blacklisting amdgpu worked. Now seeing the Plymouth
> bootsplash at bootup. Thank you again.

Great, thank you for testing.

The workaround of not loading amdgpu does not fix the issue with the tribar theme as reported, but since the tribar theme was only used to workaround the spinner theme being broken I assume that this workaround does resolve things for you ?

Comment 8 Edward 2024-07-12 15:47:14 UTC
(In reply to Hans de Goede from comment #7)
> (In reply to Edward from comment #6)
> > Confirming that blacklisting amdgpu worked. Now seeing the Plymouth
> > bootsplash at bootup. Thank you again.
> 
> Great, thank you for testing.
> 
> The workaround of not loading amdgpu does not fix the issue with the tribar
> theme as reported, but since the tribar theme was only used to workaround
> the spinner theme being broken I assume that this workaround does resolve
> things for you ?

Yes, it corrected the issue for me.

Comment 9 Bill Gianopoulos 2024-07-13 11:27:57 UTC
Thanks.  This fixed it for me.   The system also boots quicker.  For me, this also fixed the issue with tribar.
I should have realized it was something like this, as without this change the spinner worked during shutdown.
I suppose another approach to fixing would be to erase te amd-gpu-firmware package.

Comment 10 Bill Gianopoulos 2024-07-13 11:41:36 UTC
I should have mentioned that after doing the "sudo plymouth-set-default-theme bgrt"  It was necessary to do a "sudo dracut -f --kver <version>" for each of the back kernel version, or else they continued to use tribar.

Comment 11 Bill Gianopoulos 2024-07-13 11:49:29 UTC
I would think still an issue somewhere.  The system should be deciding not to load amd-gpu-firmare on amd graphics versions too old to support it.  But this would seem to not be a plymouth issue.  Not sure what component a bug on this would apply to.

Comment 12 Bill Gianopoulos 2024-07-15 14:08:01 UTC
well not loading the firmware is not what is required in fact not loading the firmware makes things worse it is actually not installing the amdgpu kernel module for older amd graphics processors that is what is required.

Comment 13 cornel panceac 2024-09-19 05:49:50 UTC
On a _very-slow-storage_ laptop i have installed latest Fedora 41 and the three dots are there. Using the amdgpu blacklist does not help. However, if i boot the F41 beta from USB stick plymouth works fine.

In systemd-analyze blame i see 'plymouth quit wait' service ran for 16.5 seconds (blacklist is in the cmdline). The not used (as far as i know) display controller is Radeon R5 M430.

I said not used because in lsmod only i915 appears to have been used while both radeon and amdgpu (before blacklist) where not used (last number was '0').

The system is not pure F41 Beta, it was updated once.

Could this be due to the very slow HDD? How can this be fixed?


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