Plymouth

Plymouth is used to show splash screens during boot and shut-down. It is a more modern alternative to fbsplash and provides flicker-free animated boot splashes with a progress bar. It also has full systemd support. However, it does not provide eye-candy for the ttys in the way fbsplash does (meaning it shows no decoration on your consoles while the system is running).

Installation
can be installed using

It will install a number of themes automatically.

However, genkernel cannot create an initramfs with a plymouth theme included. Therefore either dracut or is needed. We will here continue with genkernel-next as it is marked stable. The plymouth use flag needs to be enabled.

Configuration
The first step is to select a Plymouth theme. A list of all themes can be found using

Assuming we want to select the solar theme

Additionally we need to enable this theme in the initramfs generation:

Note that SPLASH should stay no because this parameter refers to fbsplash.

Next the grub2 config file needs to be changed to enable the splash during early boot.

Adjust the resolution to match your primary screen.

As a last step you need to recreate the initramfs and then the splash screen should work on the next system boot:

Plymouth automatically registers itself with systemd to show a splash screen during shutdown/restart.