ubuntu-server Digest, Vol 85, Issue 3

Tue Jan 8 21:57:29 UTC 2013

Apologies for replying to the digest - my subscription needs tweaking ;)

On 08/01/13 12:00, ubuntu-server-request at lists.ubuntu.com wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Re: Framebuffers, plymouth, upstart and server installs.
>       (Sander Smeenk)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2013 09:08:59 +0100
> From: Sander Smeenk <ssmeenk at freshdot.net>
> To: "ubuntu-server at lists.ubuntu.com" <ubuntu-server at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Subject: Re: Framebuffers, plymouth, upstart and server installs.
> Message-ID: <20130108080859.GY1848 at dot.freshdot.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> Quoting Mark - Syminet (mark at symonds.net):
> 
>>>> Is any of this discussable? 
Of course.

>>> Anyone?
> 
> Thanks for sending four copies of your mail :)
> 
> 
>> 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
Can you provide more details on this? Plymouth should display fsck progress
which are passed to it via mountall. There is even a special "fsck" message in
the Ubuntu theme to handle displaying such data [1]. If this is no longer
working for your particular scenario, please raise a bug so we can look at it.

> 
> Yep. Another annoyance introduced by 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. 
I'm sure you understand that 'hacking plymouth out of your system' is not a
recommended course of action as Plymouth is _the_ boot and shutdown splash
facility used by Ubuntu (and other distributions of course!) Again, if you are
experiencing problems, please raise bugs so we can fix the issues rather than
requiring you to excise core boot functionality. Plymouth provides both
graphical and text themes which should work in the majority of scenarios. As to
the reason for no output from Upstart jobs - see below...

> 
> Yes. And no. If you also use INIT_VERBOSE=yes as a kernelparam, you'll
> at least see what upstart is starting & stopping and where in the
> bootprocess you actually are...
If you add --debug or --verbose to the kernel command-line, you'll get extra
information from Upstart on the jobs as they are run.

> 
> 
>> 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.
What do you mean exactly by 'old behaviour'? Upstart has been used in Ubuntu
since Edge (6.10).

  I wish upstart had some sort of mechanism to talk
>> through a plain oldschool console too, but it appears that this isn't
>> possible?
Plymouth 'owns' the console - it has to have full access since it is not only
displaying data there itself, but it's also redirecting output from any other
process that writes to the console and multiplexing it appropriately. It also
writes data sent to the console to /var/log/boot.log.

> 
> Since 'old style' init scripts can still talk to the text console, why
> wouldn't upstart be able to do so?
It can. simply specify 'console output' to have a job output data direct to the
console (via Plymouth) [2]. This is how you see the SysV output currently - take
a look at /etc/init/rc.conf and you'll see 'console output' specified.

  As i wrote in my original mail,
> would there be a possibility to implement tee(1) functionality in
> upstart for example?  Make upstart verbose-but-not-debugging-verbose?
As of version 1.4, Upstart will, by default, log all job data to files under
/var/log/upstart/. What we are considering doing is allowing multiple
destinations to be provided to the 'console' stanza so that you could say
something like:

  console log output

...which would direct all job output to a file under /var/log/upstart *and* the
console.

Meantime, since few jobs actually explicity specify the 'console' stanza, what
you can do is add '--default-console=output' to your kernel command-line which
will send all job output to the console for those jobs which have not explicitly
specified 'console'.

> 
> 
> It's blatantly clear i am not the only one aggravated by these changes
> in Ubuntu Server and i think it's a shame none of the people involved in
> this decisionmaking are responding to this thread.
> 
> 
> -Sndr.
> 
-- 

Kind regards,

James.
--
James Hunt
____________________________________
http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook
http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/upstart_cookbook.pdf