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How to bypass boot splash screen

As of our 2008.11 release when an installation of OpenSolaris boots a graphical "splash screen", AKA "Happy Face" boot is presented.

It would be nice to be able to interrupt this and see the boot text message but this ability wasn't ready when 2008.11 shipped. It will be for the summer 2009 release.

 One way to mitigate this is to provide a GRUB menu.lst file entry to provide a "text boot". However pkg image-update does not copy this "text boot" entry. So it won't be available for new Boot Environments (BEs).

Here is how to manually update the GRUB menu.lst file to add a "text boot" entry for a BE.

1. Duplicate the BE GRUB entry.

edit /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst

Duplicate the BE entry. Starting with the title line through the module$ line.

e.g.:

title opensolaris-3
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
splashimage /boot/solaris.xpm
foreground d25f00
background 115d93
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-3
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=graphics
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

title opensolaris-3
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
splashimage /boot/solaris.xpm
foreground d25f00
background 115d93
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-3
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=graphics
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

2. From one of the entries remove the following 3 lines:

splashimage /boot/solaris.xpm
foreground d25f00
background 115d93

3. From the same entry modified in step 2 remove ,console=graphics from the end of the kernel$ line

e.g.:
Change From:
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=graphics
To:  
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS

4. An example segment from my  /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst file is below.

# BE opensolaris-3 with boot splash screen
title opensolaris-3
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
splashimage /boot/solaris.xpm
foreground d25f00
background 115d93
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-3
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=graphics
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

# BE opensolaris-3 without the boot splash screen
title opensolaris-3 text boot
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-3
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

Posted at 11:42AM Mar 13, 2009 by Joseph Vlcek in Personal  |  Comments[0]