Framebuffers, plymouth, upstart and server installs.

[Mark - Syminet]

On Jan 7, 2013, at 11:46 AM, Sander Smeenk <ssmeenk at freshdot.net> wrote:

> Quoting Sander Smeenk (ssmeenk at freshdot.net):
> 
>> I'd like to propose the (re)introduction of a special '-server' kernel
>> which has no framebuffers enabled? Some mechanism to tune GRUB into
>> verbose, 80x24 text mode when installed on a Server setup? Implement
>> 'tee(1)' functionality in Upstart perhaps?
>> 
>> Is any of this discussable? 
> 
> Anyone?
> 

The worst one here is the fact that during bootup fsck's, there is no longer any 
progress bar showing status.  No big deal for a small single disk system but If your 
server has a multi-terabyte drive array, fscks can take hours to complete and you 
are stuck staring at a blinking cursor with no idea how much longer it will take or 
if the system is even hung.  Since fscks might be run only every few months, many 
people didn't even know about this until the worst possible time (power outage, etc.) 

It appears the cause is not exactly plymouth, but rather since Karmic the SystemV 
init was replaced with upstart, which is (mostly) SysV compatible.  If you ls -l /etc/init.d 
you will see a lot of symlinks in there, all pointing to /lib/init/upstart-job.  Those used 
to be SysV init scripts; they have been converted to upstart jobs.  

Plymouth is what upstart talks to in order to send output to stdout (the monitor), and 
it requires full control over the console during bootup and shutdown.  Any job output 
does not go to the old console anymore - it needs to go through plymouth.  

This is why if you "hack" plymouth out of your system, you will notice that you only 
see output from the old SysV scripts still living in /etc/init.d - but you will see no output 
for jobs that have been converted to upstart.  Eventually /etc/init.d will be entirely 
upstart symlinks, and everything will go through plymouth.  So if you keep plymouth 
off your system… you are going to have an increasingly bad time as more jobs get 
converted to upstart.  

Maybe some devs can chime in here but from what I understand, upstart is here 
to stay come hell or high water, so any solution is going to have to work best 
practice with upstart/plymouth, with no way to get back old behavior.  I wish upstart 
had some sort of mechanism to talk through a plain oldschool console too, but it 
appears that this isn't possible?  

-- 
Mark