boot-anim

[Erik Garrison]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 12:00:54PM -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> I'm about to leave for 10 days vacation; bonus points to anyone who
> can take the 4 line change to ppmto565.py and turn this into a 'real'
> patch for 8.2.  Source code is at:
>       http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/act-gui;a=summary
> Tasks are:
> 
>  a) patch fbutil.c and/or pyfb.pyx to properly load both compressed
> and uncompressed images (since some countries have customized the boot
> sequence and fielded .565 files we should continue to support:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tweaking_the_boot_animation )
> 
>  b) patch boot-anim-start and/or pyfb.pyx to allow *un*loading boot
> animation frames.  It doesn't matter when the frames are straight
> mmaps from disk, because the kernel knows it can through those pages
> out of the page cache if it needs extra memory.  When you're doing
> computation on the mmapped data, then the pages are dirty and get
> stuck in memory, so we probably need to free the uncompressed frames
> we're no longer using.
> 
>  c) double check that this doesn't have a significant performance
> impact on the XO, probably by writing a simple script which loads &
> displays the images similar to pytest.py and timing the script on an
> XO both before and after the changes.
> 
> For extra credit, you could insert your code into the initramfs by
> rebuilding it as described at the bottom of
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Kernel_Building, and double check that it
> doesn't break (ie, that we really do have zlib in the initramfs).  If
> we don't, then it's probably reasonable to leave the activation and
> first frame parts of the animation in uncompressed form, and only
> compress frames 01-25, which are displayed after we've left the
> initramfs.

Bonus points.  Hmm.

I'm game.

Is there anyone who would be interested in working on this with me until
cscott gets back?

Erik