Beaglebone - Adding splash screen to u-boot

It currently takes 3-4 seconds for u-boot to finish and start the kernel. This means the screen is black for 3-4 seconds before showing the kernel splash. I would like the splash screen to appear (almost) instantaneous when the Beaglebone is powered up. Has anyone done this? Everyone talks about it, but I have yet to see a working solution. Can anyone shed some light on how to acheive this? Is it as simple as copying the code that does this in the kernel into u-boot?

Really? With angstrom the whole beaglebone has booted up within that time. u-boot takes 1.2s and only because there's a 1s delay configured.

Here is what I’m getting from bootchart. It takes about 3 seonds before anything happens. I’m making the assumption that this means that u-boot is taking 3 seconds…

bootchart.png

So back to my question… how do I get a splash screen during u-boot?

So back to my question... how do I get a splash screen during u-boot?

As far as I've seen, it has to be an absolute hack. You'd need to
throw in some LCD initialization code and then dump raw data to the
screen. Below is how u-boot was originally hacked for the original
BeagleBoard. We used to do this back when all we shipped was u-boot
on the boards such that we wanted to make sure you could test all the
hardware with nothing but u-boot:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/beagleboard/Otm4A6NBhiQ/discussion

Ok, thanks. It will be awhile before I can try this, but thanks for the tip.