Plymouth (software)
| Company type | Software |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | May 2007 |
| Founder | Red Hat |
| Products | Graphical bootloader for Linux |
| Website | www |
Plymouth is a graphical bootloader designed for Linux systems, featuring support for animations through the use of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) and KMS driver. It operates in conjunction with an initial ramdisk, allowing execution prior to the mounting of the file system. Although it has been suggested that the name Plymouth may allude to Plymouth Rock as the initial visible element during boot, this origin remains unverified.
History
The creation of Plymouth started in May 2007 within Red Hat as a replacement for the former Red Hat Graphical Boot (RHGB). Its first appearance as the standard boot system occurred in Fedora 10, where it took over from RHGB. Additionally, Ubuntu integrated Plymouth beginning with the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx".
Currently, Plymouth is extensively implemented across prominent desktop Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Linux Mint, MX Linux, and Manjaro Linux.
Design
The architecture of Plymouth is composed of two primary elements:
- plymouthd, a daemon tasked with managing graphics, display output, and logging functions.
- plymouth, a client application that controls configuration settings and facilitates the unlocking of encrypted drives.
Moreover, it provides a development library, libply.so, which allows software creators to develop programs that communicate directly with the daemon.