Back in October was an initial proposal for a [1]DRM splash screen client for the Linux kernel that would be primarily useful for embedded systems for rendering a simple "splash screen" when updating the system firmware/software, early display activation at boot, during system recovery, or similar processes. Sent out today was a second revision to the DRM splash screen code.

There is already Plymouth as a great boot splash screen solution for Linux systems while this DRM splash screen primarily aims to fill different niches mainly in the embedded space when needing to display a simple graphic or similar. Stemming from objections raised during the original round of code review, user-driven functionality like configurable messages and a progress bar was dropped from this proposed code. Those solutions are best off left to user-space tooling.

With these v2 patches, the stripped down functionality of the splash DRM client is left for drawing a simple colored background or loading a BMP image. The BMP image can be supplied via built-in to the kernel or loaded from the file-system or supplied by the EFI BGRT as the boot-up logo found with most modern systems.

Those interested in this proposed DRM splash client functionality can learn more about it via the [2]v2 patch series .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Splash-DRM-Client-RFC

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20260106-drm_client_splash-v2-0-6e86a7434b59@valla.it/