Bug 661559

Summary:	hitting [esc] with rhgb quiet does not show boot messages
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Toshio Ernie Kuratomi <a.badger>
Component:	systemd	Assignee:	Lennart Poettering <lpoetter>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	rawhide	CC:	j, lpoetter, metherid, mschmidt, notting, plautrba
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Triaged
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2011-02-16 23:03:00 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Toshio Ernie Kuratomi 2010-12-08 23:58:13 UTC

Description of problem:
When booting rawhide with systemd and the "rhgb quiet" kernel commandline options, plymouth displays on the screen.  If I then hit [esc] to show the boot messages about services starting, I get a blank screen.  Error messages may show up but the normal output is not displayed.  Eventually the getty displays the login prompt.  (This is with the multiuser target).

I was able to reboot without "rhgb quiet" and see normal boot messages.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
systemd-15-1.fc15
kernel-PAE-2.6.36.1-7.rc1.fc15
plymouth-0.8.4-0.20101119.2.fc15

How reproducible:
Everytime.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. reboot
2. add rhgb quiet to your kernel command line in grub
3. while the system is booting, hit [esc]
  
Actual results:
Observe that the screen is blank without any messages of what services are starting.

Expected results:
See what services are starting similar to the display you get when the system is booting without rhgb quiet on the kernel commandline.

Comment 1 Lennart Poettering 2011-01-04 23:33:42 UTC

Well, systemd hides its output if you boot with "quiet". This is in a way a change of behaviour, but I think a quite sensible one. Something we should document, but not necessarily revert.

Comment 2 Toshio Ernie Kuratomi 2011-01-05 00:13:00 UTC

Yeah, should document that you have to reboot without quiet in order to see boot messages and also should disable the ESC key blanking the screen... otherwise you're lead to believe that ESC was supposed to do something but didn't.

What happens if there are errors in the services started while booting?  Does that also n longer trigger display of messages?

Comment 3 Lennart Poettering 2011-01-05 21:26:33 UTC

By typing "systemctl" after boot you should be able to see what failed. But during boot we don't show anything by default now if "quiet" is passed.

Comment 4 Lennart Poettering 2011-02-16 23:03:00 UTC

With systemd v18 plymouth boot logging of systemd will be enabled right when ply is started even if "quiet" is passed, so that pressing Esc should give you lots of output.