I managed to get plymouth running on the Pi 2, but it appears to be for naught. It seems that the Pi doesn't support vga modes in the cmdline, so instead of graphics I get some text squares that approximate what I'm hoping for. Since it's only for about 4 seconds, at this point a simple program that would show a static image would suffice. What sort of lightweight programs are there that will work in the framebuffer console? Is it possible for the kernel logo to persist once init starts?