Bug 1059485

Summary:	initramfs needs to be regenerated when installing/uninstalling/updating/reinstalling plymouth
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Christian Stadelmann <fedora>
Component:	plymouth	Assignee:	GNOME SIG Unassigned <gnome-sig>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	rawhide	CC:	emailtoflorian, fedora, hdegoede, projects.rg, rstrode, samuel-rhbugs
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	FutureFeature
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OS:	Unspecified
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:		Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Embargoed:

Description Christian Stadelmann 2014-01-29 23:21:56 UTC

In order to work plymouth needs to be integrated into the most recent initramfs.

If we do not update the initramfs after uninstalling plymouth, the system might become unbootable. I ran into a case of this while testing:

Steps to reproduce:
1. Setup: Fedora 20 with 2 encrypted partitions / and /home in separate LUKS containers.
2. remove plymouth using yum/dnf
3. reboot

What happens:
Password prompt for / still visible and running (systemd forwards password request to plymouth), but for /home systemd tries to do the same (forwarding password request to plymouth). Since systemd changed root after mounting / there is no plymouth available to forward password requests for. This leads to a unbootable system with this message:
[ ** ] (1 of 2) A Start job is running …
[*   ] (2 of 2) A Start job is running …

(both in one line alternating. … contains something about dev-mapper, dev-by-uuid and cryptsetup. The asterisk in the brackets is moving making some kind of "busy animation".


Workaround:
1. Reinstalled plymouth from chroot (live disk or different fedora installation)
2. Rebooted (worked fine)
3. Uninstalled plymouth
4. Upgraded kernel (which generates a new initramfs)
5. Reboot (new kernel -> worked fine)

Comment 1 Fedora End Of Life 2015-05-29 10:44:25 UTC

This message is a reminder that Fedora 20 is nearing its end of life.
Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now Fedora will stop maintaining
and issuing updates for Fedora 20. It is Fedora's policy to close all
bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. At that time
this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a Fedora  'version'
of '20'.

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plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora 20 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora, you are encouraged  change the 'version' to a later Fedora 
version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above.

Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
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Comment 2 Christian Stadelmann 2016-01-25 16:11:15 UTC

Running `rpm --reinstall kernel-core-[version]` does the trick too.

Comment 3 Christian Stadelmann 2016-07-11 20:36:28 UTC

Workaround in comment #0 is in case you're running into this bug because you've uninstalled plymouth already.

Workaround in case you haven't uninstalled plymouth yet:
1. remove plymouth packages
2. update initramfs (e.g. by upgrading your kernel)
3. reboot
Make sure you don't reboot before updating initramfs.

Comment 4 Christian Stadelmann 2016-07-20 11:04:17 UTC

It might be worth implementing some sort of "rpm file trigger" to trigger initramfs regeneration. Since F24, this is done to reload systemd config after dnf or PackageKit are run: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/systemd_file_triggers

Bug #1151651 is related, it is about regenerating initramfs after changing locale.

Comment 5 Hans de Goede 2019-02-13 19:41:19 UTC

I'm not convinced regenerating the initrd is a good idea, we do kernel-updates often enough that users will pick-up the new plymouth soon enough and if the new plymouth contains some bug breaking the boot, then regenerating the initrd means we've just broken the users system in a way which is quite hard to recover from.

Comment 6 Fedora Admin user for bugzilla script actions 2024-04-19 15:56:17 UTC

This package has changed maintainer in Fedora. Reassigning to the new maintainer of this component.