[Bug 1767760] Re: plymouth timeout prevents x-server from correct initialization

[Thomas Schustek]

@ Brian Murray

Sorry, I am afraid I cannot help you. The referee is my old slowly
running notebook with daily updated Ubuntu 16.04 writing a crash report
or not on start-up. Furthermore it would be of little use because,
first, there may be slower machines out there and, second, increasing
the time-out interval does not fix the underlying problem. It is just a
quick fix and I posted the file mostly for documentation purposes.
Therefore I think I should better withdraw the patch.

As far as I understood the postings on bug report no. 1705345 the
plymouth client will hang if the plymouth daemon process has been
stopped before – whatever the reason was for the latter. So only the
calling process (e.g. a package post-installation-script) knows how to
handle a situation with a started but inactivated plymouth daemon which
may have allocated system resources before or may get in trouble when
continuing after a re-configuration of parts of the system has been
done.

In my opinion the best solution would be that every plymouth ping
request gets preceded by a check for the plymouth daemon's pid file and
for the daemon's process status by the calling process. Doing these
tests within the plymouth client would actually prevent it from getting
stuck but also will lead to ambiguous results if its exit value is
getting tested for being true or false only.

Concerning my Ubuntu implementation I can hardly imagine a reason for
the plymouth daemon to get stuck during system start-up for more than 5
seconds other than a hardware issue. Maybe the complex hard disk layout
with 17 partitions (Most of them are NTFS-formatted and one of these
gets auto-mounted by the system.) causes a delay of several seconds in
the system bootstrap process.

The complex xkb configuration can be ruled out because there is no xkb-
based console setup. As far as I have seen plymouth keyboard input
translation is based on static default console setup in /etc/console-
setup/cached.kmap.gz.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1767760

Title:
  plymouth timeout prevents x-server from correct initialization

Status in plymouth package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in plymouth source package in Xenial:
  New
Status in plymouth source package in Artful:
  New
Status in plymouth source package in Bionic:
  New

Bug description:
  After upgrading from plymouth_0.9.2-3ubuntu13.3 to
  plymouth_0.9.2-3ubuntu13.4 about 50% of all x-server initializations
  failed and Xorg crashed after entering fail-save-mode. A typical
  reason for this behaviour was that it could not acquire DRM interface
  /dev/dri/card0 not have been release before by plymouth after a time-
  out condition.

  Downgrading to plymouth_0.9.2-3ubuntu13.3 fixed the issue same as
  elongating the time-out-interval from 2.0 to at least 6.0 seconds in
  src/client/plymouth.c.

  Ubuntu 16.04.4 is running on a about 9-year-old notebook with an Intel
  Core 2 Duo U9400 @ 1.4 GHz CPU and a non-solid-state-disk. Its rather
  complex xkb configuration takes more than a second to compile.

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