How to Perform a Quiet Boot on the Raspberry Pi
If you plan on using your Raspberry Pi as a Retro gaming station or are using it in a setting where you want to remove the boot text from being displayed on the Raspberry Pi then you need to make your Raspberry Pi perform a quiet boot. A quiet boot will remove the rows of text that are displayed during a boot (also called verbose boot) and can be replaced with a logo. This can come in handy if you are making your own arcade machine or a commercial product with the Raspberry Pi.
Objective
To perform a quiet boot on the Raspberry Pi and remove the boot text
Material
You will need the following:
Instructions
Performing a quiet boot on your Raspberry Pi is very easy and it will only take us a view steps. I wrote these instructions on the official Raspbian Jessie distro but if you are running any other Raspberry Pi distro it should work the same way.
Lets connect to our Raspberry Pi over SSH or open a terminal window and type the following command:
1 | sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt |
This will open up the “cmdline.txt” file in nano, the Raspberry Pi’s text editor. There should already be some text in there and look similar to the command below. We will be editing this text to remove the boot text and perform the quiet boot.
The original “cmdline.txt” should look similar to this:
1 | dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait |
We will be making a few changes to this command line. Let’s make the following changes:
Change the console from “tty1” to “tty3”.
After changing the console we will need to add the following to the end of the command:
1 | loglevel=3 quiet logo.nologo |
Your final command should look similar to this:
1 | dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty3 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait loglevel=3 quiet logo.nologo |
You can now save the “cmdline.txt” file by pressing CTRL+X and then Y to save the file. Go ahead and reboot with the following command
1 | sudo reboot |
Your Raspberry Pi should now perform a quiet boot and all the boot text should be hidden. You will be getting a black screen during boot unless you setup your own splash screen image or video. This is permanently hide the boot text from showing up during boot unless you remove the text we have added in the previous steps.
If for any reason you are just getting stuck on a black screen during boot and your Raspberry Pi doesn’t seem to be doing anything you can press CTRL+ALT+F3 to open a terminal window and edit the “cmdline.txt” file