With a bit of hacking I was able to build kernel 5.15 in OBS and install it on the latest tumbleweed release, and it seems that plymouth works. So this issue seem to be related to a kernel upgrade. I had to add -Wno-use-after-free to CFLAGS and skip_encoding_btf_enum64 to extra_paholeopt in link-vmlinux.sh, I also got complaint about missing mkinitrd when installing the kernel, which I ignored and ran dracut -f manually. Problem: 1: nothing provides 'mkinitrd >= 2.7.1' needed by the to be installed kernel-default-5.15.4-12.1.ge2563b4.aarch64 Solution 1: do not install kernel-default-5.15.4-12.1.ge2563b4.aarch64 Solution 2: break kernel-default-5.15.4-12.1.ge2563b4.aarch64 by ignoring some of its dependencies The system doesn't boot, but the screen shows 3 dots in the middle, so it looks like plymouth is working.