A framebuffer animation daemon

  bannerd is a very simple program that reads several bitmap files, forks into
background and renders them to framebuffer with the configured interval. Since
all the decompression (if any) work is done at the start, there is very little
overhead when the animation is rendered. The only thing that the program does
is memcpy() at the necessary 32 bit aligned location and then sleep until next
frame. It is mainly intended to be used in embedded Linux systems to display
e.g. boot animation. For use on desktops many more powerful programs are
available, e.g. Plymouth (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Plymouth) and
usplash (https://launchpad.net/usplash).

  Animation that bannerd renders consists of several frames read from BMP files
in the order given in commandline. It is displayed with configured interval in
milliseconds or with the default 24fps frequency. It can also consist of one
frame in which case the program can be made to immediately exit, leaving it on
screen. Each frame may have different size but is centered on the screen.

  The complete form of its usage is:

    bannerd [options] [interval[fps]] frame.bmp ...

    -D, --no-daemon       Do not fork into the background, log
                          to stdout
    -v, --verbose         Do not suppress debug messages in the
                          log (may also be suppressed by syslog configuration)
    -c [<num>],
    --run-count[=<num>]   Display the sequence of frames <num>
                          times, then exit. If <num> is omitted,
                          repeat only once. If it is less than
                          1, ignore the option
    -p, --preserve-mode   Do not restore framebuffer mode on exit
                          which usually means leaving last frame displayed
    -i <fifo>,
    --command-pipe=<fifo> Open a named pipe <fifo> and wait for
                          commands. The pipe should exist. If -c
                          is specified, it is ignored. See bannerd(1)
                          man page for command syntax.
    interval              Interval in milliseconds between frames.
                          If 'fps' suffix is present then it is in
                          frames per second. Default:  41 (24fps)
    frame.bmp ...         list of filenames of frames in BMP format


  REQUIREMENTS

  The program needs a framebuffer driver compiled into the kernel, and it of
course uses device node /dev/fb0. This one may not be available on your board
if you are making a root filesystem by yourself or if you use udev/mdev and try
to run bannerd before any of them creates this device node (e.g., early at boot
time). In this case create the device node if it does not exist by inserting
something like

    [ -c /dev/fb0 ] || mknod /dev/fb0 c 29 0

into your boot scripts.

  You need to execute the program with sufficient permissions to open and write
to framebuffer.

  If you use OMAP CPU, you may need to hack the source code a bit before
compiling. omapfb driver does not display contents of the framebuffer unless
you ask it to, so you may need to insert a call to fb_omap_update_screen() into
main loop (in main()) just after fb_write_bitmap().


  USAGE EXAMPLES

  To continuously display animation of 8 frames with movie speed (24 frames
per second), you could use

    # bannerd 1.bmp 2.bmp 3.bmp 4.bmp 5.bmp 6.bmp 7.bmp 8.bmp

  or just

    # bannerd ?.bmp

  If you want a slower delay between frames, you can specify in in milliseconds

    # bannerd 1000 ?.bmp

  When you no longer need the displayed animation, you can kill the program by

    # pkill -TERM bannerd

  If you want the program to run once through the sequence of frames and then
exit by itself, you can use

    # bannerd -c1 ?.bmp

  A useful way to display a single image and exit, leaving it on screen, is

    # bannerd -pc image.bmp


  LIMITATIONS

  The program supports only BMP format. Support for other fomats would require
either implementing parsers from scratch or an external dependency on a library
which is not desirable for some embedded systems. Configurable support for PNG
and some other formats will be added later, though.

  BMP formats recognized by the program are: 16bpp (ARGB4444, XRGB4444, RGB565,
ARGB1555, XRGB1555), 24bpp (RGB888), 32bpp (ARGB8888, RGBA8888, RGBX8888).
Monochrome, 2bpp, 4bpp and 8bpp images are not supported. Bitmaps must be
either uncompressed (most common format) or use bitmasks.

  All the bitmap data is kept in memory in 32bpp mode to simplify rendering and
not worsen 32bpp bitmap quality at the same time. This means considerable
amount of memory consumed by the process for large animations: for a 800 x 480
32bpp bitmap 1500kB of memory are needed. Thus, long fullscreen animations may
require a lot of memory.

  At the moment, alpha blending of images is not supported.
  

  SUPPORTED PLATFORMS

  The program is supposed to run on any Linux that has a framebuffer. Its
functionality, of course, depends on the framebuffer driver (e.g., whether it
can display images in ARGB32 mode). The program has been tested on i686 :P and
ARM i.MX28 boards. If you have tested it on your board and it does not work as
expected, please contact the author(s). It will be very nice to know what is
the problem there and to fix it for as many platforms as possible.


  AUTHOR

  Questions and suggestions are highly appreciated. If you have something to
ask or to tell, please contact

  Alexander Lukichev <alexander lukichev on gmail>

  You are welcome to contribute to this program, or do whatever you want with
the source code (provided that you know what you are doing). Please respect the
license if you change source code, see COPYING for details.