Silent boot
This page is for those who prefer to limit the verbosity of their system to a strict minimum, either for aesthetics or other reasons. Following this guide will remove all text from the bootup process. Video demonstration
Kernel parameters
Change the kernel parameters using the configuration options of your boot loader, to include the following parameters:
quiet vga=current
vga=current
is the kernel argument that avoid weird behaviours like FS#32309.
If you are still getting messages printed to the console, it may be dmesg sending you what it thinks are important messages. You can change the level at which these messages will be printed by using quiet loglevel=<level>
, where <level>
is any number between 0 and 7, where 0 is the most critical, and 7 is debug levels of printing.
quiet loglevel=3 vga=current
Note that this only seems to work if both quiet
and loglevel=<level>
are both used, and they must be in that order (quiet first). The loglevel parameter will only change that which is printed to the console, the levels of dmesg itself will not be affected and will still be available through the journal as well as the dmesg
command. For more information, see the Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
file of the linux-docs package.
If you also want to stop systemd from printing its version number when booting, you should also append udev.log-priority=3
to your kernel commandline (source). If systemd is used in an initramfs, append rd.udev.log-priority=3
instead.
If you are using the systemd
hook in the initramfs, you may get systemd messages during initramfs initialization. You can pass rd.systemd.show_status=false
to disable them, or rd.systemd.show_status=auto
to only suppress successful messages (so in case of errors you can still see them). Actually, auto
is already passed to systemd.show_status=auto
when quiet
is used, however for some motive sometimes systemd inside initramfs does not get it. Below are the parameters that you need to pass to your kernel to get a completely clean boot with systemd in your initramfs:
quiet loglevel=3 rd.systemd.show_status=auto rd.udev.log-priority=3
Also touch ~/.hushlogin
to remove the Last login message.
sysctl
To hide any kernel messages from the console, add or modify the kernel.printk
line according to [1]:
/etc/sysctl.d/20-quiet-printk.conf
kernel.printk = 3 3 3 3
startx
To hide startx
messages, you could redirect its output to /dev/null
, in your .bash_profile like so:
$ [[ $(fgconsole 2>/dev/null) == 1 ]] && exec startx -- vt1 &> /dev/null
Outstanding Issues:
- Systemd shutdowns are not quiet - As of systemd v206, the
quiet
kernel command line parameter is now respected on shutdown, though it seems that if you use theshutdown
hook of mkinitcpio, this function has not been set up to support that parameter.
fsck
To hide fsck messages during boot, let systemd check the root filesystem. For this, remove fsck from:
HOOKS=(...)
in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
and then run:
mkinitcpio -p linux
Now copy the files systemd-fsck-root.service
and systemd-fsck@.service
located at /usr/lib/systemd/system/
to /etc/systemd/system/
and edit them, configuring StandardOutput and StandardError like this:
(...) [Service] Type=oneshot RemainAfterExit=yes ExecStart=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-fsck StandardOutput=null StandardError=journal+console TimeoutSec=0
See this for more info on the options you can pass to systemd-fsck
- you can change how often the service will check (or not) your filesystems.
Remove console cursor blinking
The console cursor at boot keeps blinking if you follow these intstructions. This can be solved by passing vt.global_cursor_default=0 to the kernel (source).
To recover the cursor in ttys run:
# setterm -cursor on >> /etc/issue