do Plymouth conflicts with Fsck?

[Ray Strode]

Hi,

> I'm an Ubuntu user since version 4.10, and the last fresh install i
> did were at version 6.10, and did upgrades since then.
>
> when i upgraded Ubuntu to version 10.4, i realised some issues:
> 1. Fsck, when we boot Ubuntu in text mode, stopped to work properly,
> which means that so useful and important progress bar of filesystems
> checking, simply disapeared, making us imagine that the boot process
> hanged or crashed, forcing us to restart the machine, and consequently
> getting the risk on damaging the hard disks involved.
I think there's a report on launchpad where it talks about some fsck /
plymouth interaction issue.  Something to do with tons of identical
progress updates getting sent in at the same time confusing it.  I'm
not completely sure.

Some one put a patch here which was written to work around the problem
(which presumably you're already using):

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28548

> 2. Usplash were replaced with Plymouth. I had Usplash disabled from
> the StartupManager tool, and so, when the Ubuntu upgrade replaced
> Usplash with Plymouth on my back, i didn't realize that happened,
> since Plymouth kept disabled as i wished Usplash as well.
That's a downstream integration question.

In general, though if you take "splash" off the kernel command line
then the splash screen will go away.

> 3. When i ask online about this Fsck issue, the answers i normally get
> were this has a direct relation with the Plymouth, what makes me think
> that: Plymouth is somehow conflicting with Fsck, or Plymouth disabled
> some very important configuration file items that Fsck used.
I think it's actually a bug triggered by the integration between fsck
and plymouth than ubuntu does, not a direct conflict between fsck and
plymouth.  I don't use or work on ubuntu, though, so it's a little
hard for me to know, though.

> 4. Some answers i got about this lack of Fsck progress bar in the 10.4
> upgrade were a design option from Ubuntu. For me it's more misdesign
> than design...
I don't know anything about that.

> 5. From people have Plymouth defaultly turned on, there seems to be no
> key combination for reaching the boot in text mode, specially when the
> boot process took too long, and we don't know exactly what is
> happening. Is the only possible key combination in this situation
> alt+sysrq+b ?
The escape key should work to toggle between the splash and text messages.

--Ray