From The Chakra Project - Wiki

The State of Plymouth in the chakra boot process

At the moment i am so far as to be able to compile and run the plymouth daemon and control it with the plymouth client.
If KMS is enabled, it displays the pretty graphical bootsplash, if not, it displays the also pretty textmode bootsplash.
But most importantly, it works!

Dario: I was quicker than you, nanananana :D http://git.chakra-project.org/chakra/plymouth

Additionally, I have a patch now which enables the awesumness of displaying boot messages :D

HowTo install plymouth on your own computer

first, if you have an intel graphics card, you should enable kernelbased mode-setting. We're gonna do this later anyway, so don't worry. But at first you need to add a new boot entry in menu.lst without any vga=xxx or video=xxx parts on your kernel line. But with the initrd "/kernel26-plymouth.img". And for plymouth to do ANYTHING at all, you need splash on the kernel line

# Arch Linux with bootsplash
title  Arch Linux with plymouth [/boot/vmlinuz26]
root   (hdX,Y)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sdNM ro quiet vga=792 splash
initrd /kernel26-plymouth.img

In /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf you need to add a line:

options i915 modeset=1

For building plymouth itself, check this thread: http://chakra-project.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?pid=9135#p9135

Random Thoughts and Comments (OLD)

I think i will look into miniescreen again for the very, very early boot process. miniescreen was the utility to simply fill the framebuffer with an image from an .xpm file. It depends only on the klib, which has to be in the initrd anyway for plymouth to work. like this i could first fill the screen with that image and then blend over to plymouth, as soon as it's ready. EDIT: No, I won't. plymouth can be started VERY early and is overall an awesome software!