Disabling plymouth framebuffer on servers (virtual and physical)?

[Andreas Ntaflos]

Hello list, 

I have been running a few test instances of Ubuntu 10.04 server on a few 
hosts, both as virtual and as physical instances. The problem I am 
having is that the usage of a framebuffer (that's what I believe it is) 
in plymouth *really* slows down the console output. It is worst when 
using virt-manager or virt-viewer to access the console of a virtual 
machine instance.

I have set the Grub default commandline in /etc/default/grub to "text", 
i.e. removed "quiet". When booting up it shows a lot of the usual 
kernel boot-up messages, which fly by very fast. Then comes a point 
where some switch occurs (Kernel Mode Setting kicking in?) and 
everything becomes dog slow. I have made a screencast to illustrate 
this: https://daff.pseudoterminal.org/misc/console-slow.ogg

What you see is not a recording artifact or anything like it, the output 
really is that slow. The situation is of course better on real hardware 
with a real graphics card but even there the output is slower than it 
should be.

So how can I disable this behaviour in plymouth and go back to regular 
console output without any framebuffer or KMS? Can I do something with 
virt-manager/Libvirt to mitigate this?

Needless to say Ubuntu 9.10 server instances run fine and the console 
output is as fast as ever. It is plymouth and related changes that seem 
to screw things up.

Any help or insight is appreciated!

Thanks in advance, 

Andreas
-- 
Andreas Ntaflos
Vienna, Austria

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