I did some more testing using my Thinkpad. I measured the time from pressing
the laptop's power button until some image from Plymouth appears and also the
total time (including that) until I get the login screen. The times were
measured with a stopwatch so the timing might off by ~ +1/-1 seconds. But for
the sake of this experiment, it does not matter. I turned the laptop off
after each test and started the timer when I powered on.
Below is a table of the times.
Trisquel Ubuntu
4.5 5 5(m) 10.10 11.04 11.04(m) 11.10 11.10(m)
Plymouth ~22 ~31 ~32 ~32 ~29 ~30 ~31 ~32
Login ~32 ~45 ~45 ~34 ~34 ~35 ~35 ~36
Notes:
- time in seconds
- (m) indicates the removal of vt.handoff.
The variations between (m) and without (m) are likely due to my own error. In
other words, removing vt.handoff should not make it slower.
From the above results I conclude (as myself being the only subject) that:
1. the "long wait" mentioned in my comment #8 probably isn't related to this
whole issue specifically. Trisquel 5 and all the Ubuntus took approximately
the same time to show the Plymouth animation. I guess I was used to 4.5's
quicker startup.
2. vt.handoff is (one of) the reason(s) why some graphics cards (I suspect
mostly nvidea+nouveau) cause a corruption with Plymouth. I came across some
other Ubuntu Plymouth related issues (I don't have the URLs anymore) that are
also caused by the presence of vt.handoff.
[SOLUTION]
If you are experiencing Plymouth graphical corruption at startup similar to
this image attached to this Ubuntu bug report then my solution is to remove
the vt.handoff parameter from your grub configuration. The steps are as
follows:
sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/10_linux
Find the line that has "vt.handoff" in it (it should be around line 70).
Change it from:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT vt.handoff=7"
to:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT"
Save.
sudo update-grub.
[/SOLUTION]
Daniel Molina, Hiawatha and others who are experiencing this issue, could you
please try the above solution and confirm that it no longer corrupts the
Plymouth animation?
