Re: splash(4) support in vt

 Hello,

 Yes I'm replying to myself and to an old thread.

On Thu, 16 Mar 2023 09:20:07 +0100
Emmanuel Vadot <manu@bidouilliste.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 16 Mar 2023 09:26:30 +0300
> Gleb Popov <arrowd@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 10:57?PM Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > There are many individual tasks to be taken on; we need at least to
> > > get the image displayed earlier in the boot process, support more than
> > > just a 2-colour image, and support a user-provided (rather than
> > > compiled-in) image. We probably also need some animation support (e.g.
> > > a spinner). These tasks are all related but are mostly independent, so
> > > could be taken on in any order. What is your priority on these?
> > 
> > I think we'd need to start from getting more colors work. Our final
> > goal is a GIF-animated splash.
> > 
> > >
> > > The Wiki page linked from the mailing list posting is
> > > https://wiki.freebsd.org/MateuszPiotrowski/ImproveVtSplashScreenSupport,
> > > and it has a basic introduction. Looking at the source, the current
> > > logo is stored in sys/dev/vt/logo/logo_freebsd.c as a C array holding
> > > a 257x219 bitmap. If you look at vt_fb_bitblt_bitmap (and similar
> > > functions in other drivers) you can see that it loops over each pixel
> > > where the image will be drawn, and sets it to either the foreground or
> > > background color.
> > 
> > Which is the reason it only supports 2-color images, I presume?
> > 
> > Thanks for the links, I'll take a look!
> > 
> 
>  Hi Gleb,
> 
>  Thanks for being interested in this, a few notes on how I think it
> should be done below.
> 
>  First step is to handle more colors for the embeded logo, we only
> support a depth of 1 currently, see
> https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/sys/dev/vt/vt_core.c#n1483
> 
>  Second step should be to switch from a compiled-in logo to a file
> loaded from loader. The old sc(4) console support this (see
> splash_bmp_load/splash_pcx_load in loader.conf(5)). I don't think that
> the kernel should be aware of image format, instead loader(8) should be
> able to load an image and convert in to a blob of pixel to draw based
> on the framebuffer information (with EFI it's simple to know this).
>  So I suggest adding a new type of module named 'splash_logo' of
> something like that that will hold the data, size and depth of the
> image.

 All of the above is now done, you can have a look at
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D45929 and child reviews.
 This will only work with EFI and .png file, and I don't plan to work on
adding support for bios/vbe (even if vbe support shouldn't be hard to
do) or any other image format (loader only knows on how to deal with
png and I think that this is enough).

 Cheers,

>  You can have a look at how this worked with sc(4) here :
> https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/sys/dev/fb/splashreg.h
>  Maybe this should also hold a screen position (probably in percentage).
> 
>  For animated logo adding a splash_spinner type is probably the best
> way. The problem will be to animate this, not sure that handling this
> in the kernel is the best way. I think that in Linux it's handled by
> plymouth and since it's start early in initrd it's easier for them to
> do it that way. But I think that you have enough work for now :)
> 
>  Cheers,


-- 
Emmanuel Vadot <manu@bidouilliste.com> <manu@freebsd.org>