Text console messages are displayed briefly during shutdown

[Matt Zimmerman]

Binary package hint: usplash

During a normal shutdown sequence, I see:

1. My X session
2. A text console with startup messages on it
3. usplash

We should be able to replace #2 with a black screen, if it can't be eliminated entirely. The text, which flickers in very briefly, is jarring.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

There are already at least two places where we attempt to correct this:

/etc/init.d/usplash:56: clear >/dev/tty8

/sbin/usplash_down:26: tput -Tlinux reset > /dev/tty8

I think that a race condition remains, where the X server switches back to vt8 before usplash_down has been invoked.

[RIco (rico-rootscore-deactivatedaccount)]

I can confirm this behaviour is still present in jaunty final (amd64), i get text, usplash and again some text saying "system will halt now" or "system will reboot". This was on fresh install, no tweaks added.

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

Raised to medium in Karmic because of the push for a cleaner shutdown experience.

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

But we're not doing anything to the shutdown experience ;-)

[raul (rausuar)]

I am also affected by this issue. Using Karmic Alpha 5 - 32 bits (Ver. 12 September/09) in a HP Pavilion dv2872la laptop.

Once I click in the restart/shutdown option in Gnome, the screen flickers momentarily with the text content of the console shown with CRTL + ALT + F8, and then, the Ubuntu usplash screen appears.

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

Not In Progress; we have no plans to work on the "look" of the shutdown sequence for karmic, as the boot is our current focus

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

In alpha 6, usplash is being used in shutdown now to hide these.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 05:56:33PM -0000, Robbie Williamson wrote:
> In alpha 6, usplash is being used in shutdown now to hide these.

Can someone clarify what was changed, in which version(s) of which
package(s), to fix this?

--
 - mdz

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I'm not convinced that this was really entirely fixed. We do use usplash on shutdown, and of late we do so rather more reliably since usplash has been converted to use upstart (in usplash 0.5.39). However, starting usplash before X has switched back to its original console doesn't work properly, so we have to start it after the display manager has stopped, which means that there's a brief but noticeable flicker to text mode.

I'm not sure yet whether we can do anything about this for Karmic, but I'm going to keep it on the list for now. Scott, if you're not happy about this being assigned to you (since I know you have a lot on your plate with boot, let alone shutdown), feel free to reassign it to me.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

usplash is as good as it's going to get in this regard for Karmic. Right now, the flicker will be the brief switch back to text mode, now fairly reliably on tty1, before usplash kicks in. I think it is now briefer than before and probably with fewer junk messages, but that's about it.

The fundamental problem here is that X is quite insistent about switching back to the console it started on, and restoring the state of that console. This means that (a) if you start X without shutting down usplash first, you get switched back to a corrupted console if you try to use Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6]; and (b) X will always switch back to tty1, and trying to start usplash before it does so achieves very little since they have a bit of a deathmatch and you usually end up on a text console at best.

Now, you might say that none of this should be a problem with KMS, and you'd probably be right. However, X doesn't seem to have been educated in the fact that it doesn't need to do mode restoration when we switch away from its VT (or else something else is going on), and in any case we'd still need to arrange the Upstart jobs such that they don't break systems using video drivers not yet converted to KMS.

We'll look at this further for Lucid, since the underlying problem affects both boot and shutdown.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

The usplash package has been superseded by plymouth and has been removed from the Ubuntu archive. Closing all related bugs.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Phillip, are you sure that this problem doesn't affect plymouth?

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

No, I'm not sure. I'll have to test it and if it does, open a task on plymouth.