plymouth is disabled after upgrade from trusty due to missing "splash" kernel arg

[Tim Lunn]

I upgraded a mostly clean install of 14.04.4 -> 16.04 (Ubuntu GNOME). Plymouth is never displayed on the upgraded system.

This is due to the grub config not having the "splash" kernel commandline argument currently

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: grub2-common 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-21.37-generic 4.4.6
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-21-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Thu Apr 21 00:47:49 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-02-25 (55 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 14.04.4 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20160217.1)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: grub2
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to xenial on 2016-04-21 (0 days ago)

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1572874

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Indeed the default changed with the big plymouth merge in xenial. This should get a postinst to add the flag to the grub config on upgrades.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

I installed a standard Ubuntu trusty desktop amd64, and that *does* set the "splash" option in grub by default. Also, if I remove "splash" I don't see the graphical plymouth screen. So in that regard it behaves pretty much exactly like xenial. Does Ubuntu GNOME configure this differently, in the splash theme package perhaps?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

I was wondering how trusty's plymouth handles the kernel command line, as the "splash" option isn't evaluated in the upstart jobs. It seems this is done in src/main.c, plymouth_should_show_default_splash():

 if (command_line_has_argument (state->kernel_command_line, "splash"))
    {
      ply_trace ("using default splash because kernel command line has option \"splash\"");
      return true;
    }
[...]
  ply_trace ("no default splash because kernel command line lacks \"splash\" or \"rhgb\"");
  return false;

This seems to decide between the default (graphical) splash or the text mode where it shows detailed messages. AFAICS, ubuntu-gnome-default-settings does not fundamentally change this.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

I installed Ubuntu GNOME 14.04.4 amd64, and this also gets "splash" on the kernel command line by default. Are you sure that you didn't manually remove this?

I dist-upgraded this to 16.04 then; this was a bit bumpy (took some apt-get -f installs, but this is unrelated). After that I still had "splash" in the command line, and during boot I see the gray/white double u logo with the blue spinner, which should be the plymouth splash.

So I'm afraid I either cannot reproduce this or I misunderstand what the issue is here.

[Tim Lunn (darkxst)]

No I didnt change it, however like I mentioned on IRC it is possible that vmware is messing with the boot arguments. I will check this over the weekend. I've been away this week. None the less the plymouth splash did work in trusty.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

> None the less the plymouth splash did work in trusty.

The text or graphical one? I don't see how the graphical one would run without "splash".

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for plymouth (Ubuntu Xenial) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]