using plymouth for a little more than boot animations

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

How heavily is plymouth tied into the standard boot process, from both
the technical and design-level standpoints?

We're considering using it for OLPCs boot animation but we have some
extra requirements.

We have a security system implemented in the initramfs, and one part of
this is tasked with retreiving an activation lease (which basically is a
signature which allows the system to boot for a certain number of days).
It takes a little while to obtain this lease and has a
(framebuffer-based) GUI on top of it.

I'll try to explain in more detail:
All this happens very early in the boot sequence -- before starting the
boot animation, before starting any init scripts etc.

The GUI comes up, with an XO icon in the center of the screen. The
serial number of the laptop is printed immediately below.
On the next "line" there are 3 icons, greyed out to begin with:
 1. USB
 2. SD
 3. Wireless

The system starts looking for a lease on any attached USB storage
devices. While doing this, it blinks the USB icon on and off.
If not found on USB, it then tries to look for a lease on a SD card, and
blinks the SD card icon during this process.
If not found on USB or SD, it then tries to find a lease from a school
server connected to an open wireless access point, or from a lease
server running on the OLPC mesh channels, blinking the LEDs in the
process.

If a lease was not found, it then paints a new screen with the XO figure
removed and the message "activation lease not found" and shuts down
after about 2 minutes.

If a lease was found, it is installed to the appropriate location and
then the system boot process is started (init is started, standard boot
animation is started, etc).


How feasible would it be to implement this with plymouth? Would drastic
changes be needed to the core?
I suppose it's not a showstopper for using plymouth if this isn't
possible, as the 2 processes are effectively separate.. we could use our
old bootanim code for activation GUI, and then finish up and execute
plymouth once we're done.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Daniel