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