A graphical boot system and logger
plymouth is a graphical boot system for Linux which takes advantage of the kernel-based mode setting (KMS) available for modern graphic cards to provide a seamless, flickerfree and attractive boot screen. It allows to choose between various, static or animated graphical themes to spruce up the startup and avoid the noise generated by the vast amount of kernel messages while the machine boots into X. On systems where kernel-based mode setting is not available, plymouth falls back to a text mode boot screen which provides a simple progress bar to pro\(hy vide feedback during boot.
In order for the configured default plymouth theme to be loaded during boot, the option `splash' (or `rhgb' for backward compatibility with the RHGB boot splash) must be provided at the kernel command line. Without this command line option, plymouth will default to showing detailed boot output.
During the boot process, the user can switch between the graphical theme and the detailed boot output using the Escape key.
grub(8), plymouth-set-theme(1), plymouthd(8), plymouth(1), \m[blue]http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Plymouth\m[]
plymouth was originally prototyped and named by Kristian Høgsberg, originally written by Ray Strode and has had significant contributions from Charlie Brej. It has also had contributions from Peter Jones, Adam Jackson, Frederic Crozat and others.