Re: Laptop bootup randomly stalls

[Sam Varshavchik]

Richard Shaw writes:

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>  My wife's laptop has been having some sort of problem booting up since F18,  
>  though I have no idea if the current problem with F20 is the same problem or  
>  not.
>
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>  The bootup process will randomly stall and most of the time you can't get to  
>  a VT though it isn't locked up as a Ctl-Alt-Del will cause a proper shutdown  
>  and reboot. There's a lot of noise trying to find the issue in journalctl -b  
>  -1 (after a successful boot) but I think MAYBE this is it... 
I'm seeing this bug in F20 also. I use the solar theme, which makes it easy  
to see that plymouth keeps churning, and it never stops. Usually after one  
or two three-fingered salutes, my laptop decides to finish booting, but I'm  
seeing this bug on several machines, not just the laptop.

This is either a plymouth bug, or a bug triggered by plymouth. Some hardware  
seems to be more afflicted than other. My laptop get stuck maybe, on 5% of  
all the boots. At one point, on one of my servers, plymouth started wedging  
on maybe 75-80% of all the boots. I wasn't absolutely certain that plymouth  
was the culprit, but I uninstalled it on that server. After all traces of  
plymouth were gone (after the next kernel update brought in a fresh  
initramfs) that server never failed to boot, ever since. So, it has to be  
either plymouth, or plymouth-triggered.

I haven't been annoyed with my laptop often enough to do anything else, so  
occasionally I just three-finger salute it, and that's that. I haven't  
looked at systemd's journal; it's filled with tons of junk, and I just don't 

have the energy to dig this out.

If this gets annoying, just rip plymouth out, and that should fix it.