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.
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.
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?
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.
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.