On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 11:10 AM Chris Murphy <lists(a)colorremedies.com> wrote:
cc: cloud@, server@ fpo
Hi,
When troubleshooting early boot issues with a console, e.g. virsh console, or the
virt-manager console, or even a server's remote management console providing a kind of
virtual serial console... the boot scroll is completely wiped. This is a new behavior in
the last, I'm not sure, 6-12 months? Everything before about 3 seconds is cleared as
if the console reset command was used, as in it wipes my local scrollback.
I captured this with the script command, and when I cat this 76K file, it even wipes the
local console again. So there is some kind of control character that's ordering my
local console to do this. The file itself contains the full kernel messages. I just
can't cat it. I have to open it in a text editor that ignores this embedded console
reset command.
With the help of @glb, we discovered that this is almost certainly Plymouth. When I boot
with parameter plymouth.enable=0 the problem doesn't happen. And hence the higher
level question if we really even need Plymouth in Server or Cloud editions?
I suppose ideally we'd track down the problem and fix plymouth, so that existing
installations get fixed. Whereas if we remove plymouth, we have to ponder whether and how
to remove plymouth from existing installations. Unless we flat out aren't using it at
all.
Any ideas?
Plymouth is in the @core group in fedora-comps, so pretty much everything gets it.
https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/blob/main/f/comps-f37.xml.in#_635
Plymouth is used to provide the interface for decrypting disks and
presenting information about software/firmware updates, so I'd be
loath to remove it.
That said, it should all be captured in systemd journal logs though.
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!