Re: Bug#734093: debian-installer: install plymouth by default
On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 11:28:58AM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Josh Triplett wrote:
> > If the goal here is to hide the boot messages by default, note that
> > the default kernel command line includes "quiet", which hides most
> > kernel messages and systemd messages.
>
> Note that the hiding of systemd messages is unintentional, and can make
> debugging a system that fails to boot challanging. #718038
>
> I asked the systemd maintainers to not make it overload quiet to do
> that, but they don't want to, so if systemd continues being used in
> Debian (even if not as default), d-i will need to start adding
> systemd.show_status=1 to the kernel command line.
Do you mean the options used within d-i itself, or on the installed
system?
If you mean the former, note that systemd should be recording bootup
messages in such a way that they show up on the same secondary TTY used
for syslog messages, which ought to suffice.
If you mean the latter, that configuration is owned by the grub-common
package, not by d-i. And in any case, grub-common should not be abusing
its configuration of the *kernel* command line to override the defaults
of packages other than the kernel.
More generally, a quiet boot is a feature, not a bug. The bug you filed
is absolutely legitimate, but making bootup noisier by default isn't the
right way to fix it. To the best of my knowledge, with "quiet", systemd
is supposed to behave the same way the kernel does: shut up about
commands that succeed, but still shout about failures, making them
*easier* to notice. If that's not happening, that's a bug to be fixed.
And in any case, step 1 in debugging a failure to boot should be "try
booting without quiet" (or boot in recovery mode, which also omits
quiet).
- Josh Triplett
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