Problem with redirecting output to boot terminal

[Andrey Borzenkov]

Hi,

It took me some time to understand why output from rc.sysinit was not visible.

In initrd we start plymouthd and call "plymouth --show-splash". Now I
do not have any splash to show (i.e. no "splash" on command line) but
plymouthd still switches active console to boot terminal which in our
case in tty7.

Later rc.sysinit starts, checks whether splash is active and
terminates plymouthd by calling "plymouth quit". It dutifully changes
active console back to tty1, but the problem is, rc.sysinit already
has tty7 open, all output goes there and is invisible.

Only after next script starts anything appears on tty1.

The question is - why would we switch to tty7 (or whatever is defined
in configuration) when we know that no splash is going to be shown
anyway? This splits boot output between several terminals and is
really confusing.

TIA

-andrey