Kernel Boot messages broken

[undecidable]

Have racked my brains about this for months, and spent a couple of days
messing with every option I can think of,
and while I now understand better the problem
I cannot fix it.

THE PROBLEM - SIMPLIFIED
I like a noisy boot, with lots of messages
that tell me what is happening, what is causing delays,
what has failed (in case of non-boot) etc,
not to mention impressing the pants off Windows admins.

Up to Kubuntu 10.10 I could easily get this just by
removing the "splash quiet" options from the grub kernel line.

But with Kubuntu 11.04, even after I remove "splash quiet",
then during boot, after the grub screen
I get a 15" (Fifteen second!!!) black screen,
then finally a few text lines, then the login prompt.

THE PROBLEM - DETAIL
Up to 10.10, the boot console would display kernel messages
(as shown after boot by dmesg)
and boot log messages (as in /var/log/boot.log)
mixed together.

From 11.04, the boot console only shows boot log messages,
the kernel messages are missing,
which leads to a mostly black screen booting process.

In fact I can see that the kernel messages seem to be going to tty1
(can see them there when I temp switch to tty1 at the gui login prompt).
So I could probably fix this problem if I could get these kernel
messages back to tty7,
which I think is where boot happens?

But editing /etc/default/grub to:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=795 console=tty7 loglevel=7"
does not return the kernel messages to the boot console where I can see them.

I realize my love of a noisy, turbulent boot process is against the march of progress
but if anyone knows how to get back my lovely, informative, educational, verbose boot process, I would be grateful

[dandnsmith]

As a desperation measure you could try the effect of noquiet and nosplash options - I seem to remember seeing these in use at some point.

[undecidable]

Remarkably, nosplash brings back the splash screen, interesting but not useful.

noquiet does nothing.

Not surprising really as I think the messages are getting logged, but just not to the boot console.

[dandnsmith]

That's curious - I haven't seen quite that effect with the splash, but have seen noquiet apparently ignored.

I've just recalled that in the last couple of days I've seen difference between what happens when you use grub original as opposed to grub 2 (so called) - I have these on two different PCs - but didn't spend any time to chase it down, after all, life's just too short for some trivia.

[drs305]

Are you using a theme or grub background image by chance?

Your frustration has been expressed by others. A few days ago I found that if I turned off a theme I'd employed for testing I was able to get the boot text back. The theme didn't seem to care whether I had 'quiet splash' or not - it wouldn't display the text even after passing control to the kernel.

[undecidable]

Am not using themes or grub background images, so that won't be the problem.

Am using grub 1.99-rc1 in 11.04
whereas 10.10 (which boots correctly) uses 1.98.
However both are grub2, so it is not a grub1 / grub2 difference.

[Manu38400]

Hi,

I get the same issue, where you finally able tyo find a solution ?

thanks in advance,
Manu

[undecidable]

The problem appears to be with the new boot manager, Plymouth
but those irritated by it are mostly those who run servers
and people like me who find beauty in order
(rather than a haphazardly flickering screen)
and like to see what is going on.

There is much discussion about how to fix it, eg

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/inde...t-1658718.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/inde...t-1457388.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/inde...t-1464639.html
http://people.adams.edu/~cdmiller/po...erver-upstart/
http://people.adams.edu/~cdmiller/po...-text-console/
http://people.adams.edu/~cdmiller/po...able-plymouth/

And I tried much of it, in particular:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=795 loglevel=7"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=795 console=tty7 loglevel=7"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=795 loglevel=7 noplymouth"	
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=795 loglevel=7 noplymouth INIT_VERBOSE=yes init=/sbin/init -v"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=795 loglevel=7 nomodeset noplymouth INIT_VERBOSE=yes init=/sbin/init -v"		
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=795 loglevel=7 nomodeset noplymouth init=/sbin/init -v"	
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=795 loglevel=7 nomodeset noplymouth"

plus I tried

sudo mv  /etc/init/plymouth*  /init/temphold/

which also did nothing nothing.

key points:

1. noplymouth does not work
2. loglevel=7 makes no difference
3. there was still a long period of black screen with no messages, nothing.
4. INIT_VERBOSE=yes init=/sbin/init -v gives lots of useless init messages but not the useful kernel messages.

Of course you can get the kernel messages after logging in from /var/log/kern.log,
but that is not the point.

I plan to file a launchpad bug against it.

[macachuto]

Have you opened a bug about this problem.
I am testing Xubuntu 12.04 and have completely the same bug - black screen for a 10 sec. and then login prompt. There is no any boot messages.

Thanks

[toomas]

I got kernel messages back by removing the "quiet", "splash", and "vt.handoff" parameters, and editing the `linux_gfx_mode' part of the Grub menu, setting it unconditionally to "text". You can edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg directly, or make the change permanent by editing the configuration files in /etc/ and running grub-mkconfig:

--- /etc/default/grub.orig 2012-03-13 12:15:36.790657087 +0200
+++ /etc/default/grub 2012-03-13 12:15:48.438656683 +0200
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
-GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
+GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs

--- /etc/grub.d/10_linux.orig 2012-03-13 12:03:56.890681321 +0200
+++ /etc/grub.d/10_linux 2012-03-13 12:05:44.858677583 +0200
@@ -153,32 +153,8 @@
prepare_boot_cache=
prepare_root_cache=

-# Use ELILO's generic "efifb" when it's known to be available.
-# FIXME: We need an interface to select vesafb in case efifb can't be used.
-if [ "x$GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX" != x ]; then
- echo "set linux_gfx_mode=$GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX"
-else
- cat << EOF
-if [ \${recordfail} != 1 ]; then
- if [ -e \${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt ]; then
- if hwmatch \${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3; then
- if [ \${match} = 0 ]; then
- set linux_gfx_mode=keep
- else
- set linux_gfx_mode=text
- fi
- else
- set linux_gfx_mode=text
- fi
- else
- set linux_gfx_mode=keep
- fi
-else
- set linux_gfx_mode=text
-fi
-EOF
-fi
cat << EOF
+echo set linux_gfx_mode=text
export linux_gfx_mode
if [ "\$linux_gfx_mode" != "text" ]; then load_video; fi
EOF

Cheers,
T.

P.S. I would have added the above patch as an attachment, but I could not do anything in the window that popped up after I clicked "Manage Attachents". What could be the matter? I tried it with Konqueror 4.7.4 (Gnome 2, Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric)).
T.