Hey folks!
So I've filed a bug recently which may need wider discussion about the resolution. The bug report is:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1933378
The problem is this. If plymouth is installed but no graphical theme is installed/configured - which is currently the case for at least Server and minimal installs - plymouth uses a 'fallback' text theme, which Hans says is under-maintained. Since around Fedora-Rawhide- 20210122.n.0, openQA has been encountering an intermittent problem where this theme does not clear properly when boot is complete and the console login is shown, it looks like this:
https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/tests/799388#step/_console_wait_login/6
It gets worse once you actually try and log in - bits of the grey background get wiped and replaced with black in ugly patterns, this both looks dumb and makes working around the bug in openQA by adding more screenshots impractical (because the pattern of the background just keeps changing). This bug does not seem to happen if a Plymouth graphical theme is installed and configured, only if the fallback text theme is used.
In the bug report, we did a bit of looking into what bits of Plymouth are installed when. In comps, 'plymouth' itself is listed as 'mandatory' in @core. This seems to ultimately date back to https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/0dca8c2b3f04624873918e6dfef12f27bf1a6d75 by Bill, which was in response to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=801087 (the bug number in the commit is a typo). The commit claims "Add plymouth to core, to match prior releases", but it was *not* in @core in "previous releases" so far as I can tell; it may have been pulled into minimal installs via dependencies (I can check an F16 minimal install later).
'plymouth-system-theme' - which installs the default graphical theme - is in the 'base-x' group. So only package sets that include base-x will install a graphical theme for Plymouth. This includes all major desktops, but does *not* include at least Server or minimal installs (and probably some other subsets I'm not thinking of). Anything that includes @core but *not* @base-x will hit the broken configuration.
Obviously one option here is just to fix the bug in Plymouth, but Hans suggested that we should fix it by not installing Plymouth in this configuration - i.e. we should only ever install plymouth and plymouth- system-theme or no plymouth at all.
If you don't have plymouth installed, you get a very old-school "wall of text" boot process; if there are encrypted system partitions, you get a plain text prompt for the encryption passphrase, with no keyboard layout indicator (I'm not sure if the text theme indicates the keyboard layout either).
Starting from a minimal install with plymouth omitted, adding just plymouth itself pulls in 3 packages (plymouth, plymouth-core-libs, plymouth-scripts) with an installed size of 621K. Adding plymouth- system-theme pulls in 32 packages with an installed size of 24M. So putting plymouth-system-theme in @core would substantially inflate the size of @core in terms of both number of packages and overall installed size. Removing plymouth from @core would not save a lot in terms of packages or space.
So, I guess the question here is, what do we do?
1) Remove plymouth from @core 2) Add plymouth-system-theme to @core 3) Make Hans/Ray/someone fix the plymouth bug
Opinions? :) Thanks!
On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 12:14:07PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
If you don't have plymouth installed, you get a very old-school "wall of text" boot process; if there are encrypted system partitions, you get a plain text prompt for the encryption passphrase, with no keyboard layout indicator (I'm not sure if the text theme indicates the keyboard layout either).
I, for one, am for it. I _expect_ my servers to provide an old-school wall of text boot.
(Perhaps we could add some text-mode cue for keyboard layout?)
On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 03:52:04PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 12:14:07PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
If you don't have plymouth installed, you get a very old-school "wall of text" boot process; if there are encrypted system partitions, you get a plain text prompt for the encryption passphrase, with no keyboard layout indicator (I'm not sure if the text theme indicates the keyboard layout either).
I, for one, am for it. I _expect_ my servers to provide an old-school wall of text boot.
Same here. I'm fine removing it...
kevin
On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 12:27 PM Kevin Fenzi kevin@scrye.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 03:52:04PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 12:14:07PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
If you don't have plymouth installed, you get a very old-school "wall of text" boot process; if there are encrypted system partitions, you get a plain text prompt for the encryption passphrase, with no keyboard layout indicator (I'm not sure if the text theme indicates the keyboard layout either).
I, for one, am for it. I _expect_ my servers to provide an old-school wall of text boot.
Same here. I'm fine removing it...
+1
+1 on removal
________________________________ From: Stephen Gallagher sgallagh@redhat.com Sent: Friday, March 5, 2021 7:29 PM To: Development discussions related to Fedora devel@lists.fedoraproject.org; server@lists.fedoraproject.org server@lists.fedoraproject.org Subject: Re: Plymouth, themes and console clearing: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1933378
On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 12:27 PM Kevin Fenzi kevin@scrye.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 03:52:04PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 12:14:07PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
If you don't have plymouth installed, you get a very old-school "wall of text" boot process; if there are encrypted system partitions, you get a plain text prompt for the encryption passphrase, with no keyboard layout indicator (I'm not sure if the text theme indicates the keyboard layout either).
I, for one, am for it. I _expect_ my servers to provide an old-school wall of text boot.
Same here. I'm fine removing it...
+1 _______________________________________________ server mailing list -- server@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to server-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/server@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
On Thu, 2021-03-04 at 15:52 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 12:14:07PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
If you don't have plymouth installed, you get a very old-school "wall of text" boot process;
I, for one, am for it. I _expect_ my servers to provide an old-school wall of text boot.
(Perhaps we could add some text-mode cue for keyboard layout?)
The only concern I have here is if this slows down the boot speed? Like if I "cat file" on a virtual console it will take a noticeable amount of time.
Dnia Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 12:14:07PM -0800, Adam Williamson napisał(a):
Starting from a minimal install with plymouth omitted, adding just plymouth itself pulls in 3 packages (plymouth, plymouth-core-libs, plymouth-scripts) with an installed size of 621K. Adding plymouth- system-theme pulls in 32 packages with an installed size of 24M. So putting plymouth-system-theme in @core would substantially inflate the size of @core in terms of both number of packages and overall installed size. Removing plymouth from @core would not save a lot in terms of packages or space.
plymouth-theme-hot-dog is only 400 KiB ;)
/ducks
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