Crypt password prompt ignores keypresses for several minutes before responding

[Leon Weber]

Binary package hint: live-initramfs

On a machine running Kubuntu 10.04 with full disk encryption and a mirror raid setup, the graphical password prompt does not take any keypresses for several minutes, I would guess it takes about five minutes before it becomes responsive. During that time, nothing is echoed no matter what I type, entering the password and pressing enter does not help, ctrl+alt+del does not work.

I am unsure whether the issue is related to Bug 537793, however on my machine not a single keystroke is recognized and the problem resolves itself after some time. From these differences I guess that I am hitting a different bug, so I am opening an extra ticket.

The issue persists when booting with the nosplash parameter. The machines boots without a splash screen then, however the password prompt still is graphical, so there is no difference in the critical part.

Attached are the boot.log and kern.log files. I have found an interesting line in kern.log, which might be a key here:

May 13 20:05:41 holbach kernel: [ 2.702827] device-mapper: ioctl: device doesn't appear to be in the dev hash table.

On the terminal itself I get another line just below the above one, not sure in which log file it ends up:

udevd-work[121]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: No such file or directory

The problem started occuring all of the sudden one or two days ago, I am not aware of any changes to the system that could be causing the problem. All I have done since then was some debugging for Bug 578732.

ii plymouth 0.8.2-2ubuntu2
ii initramfs-tools 0.92bubuntu78
ii initramfs-tools-bin 0.92bubuntu78
ii initscripts 2.87dsf-4ubuntu17
ii cryptsetup 2:1.1.0~rc2-1ubuntu13

Please let me know if you need any additional information. Also, I do not really have an idea how to debug the issue further, so any hints would be appreciated.

[Leon Weber (leonn)]

I am unsure about the right binary package, however it is certainly not live-initramfs.

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

Certainly not Upstart either

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

And not cryptsetup, which does no direct prompting; the prompts are via plymouth. This looks like a kernel problem.

> The issue persists when booting with the nosplash parameter. The
> machines boots without a splash screen then, however the password prompt
> still is graphical, so there is no difference in the critical part.

'nosplash' is not a supported parameter. If you want to boot without splash, boot without the 'splash' option.

[Leon Weber (leonn)]

Oh, ok. I've now booted without the 'quiet' and 'splash' parameters which brought me to a text mode password prompt where the problem did not occur. Later today, I will check whether this is a reliable workaround or if I was just lucky this time.

[Leon Weber (leonn)]

The problem seems to be related to USB hard disks that are attached to the machine.

There are two of these devices, let's call them A and B. When booting with both disconnected (or powered off) or with only disk A connected, the problem does not occur. It only occurs when disk B is connected.

Disk B is a 1TB disk inside a Trekstor DataStation maxi g.u usb case: http://www.trekstor-fileserver.de/trekstor-pdfs/pdf_web/datastation_maxi_gu_en.pdf

The time until the system becomes responsive is very fluctuating. It usually takes aroung 80 or 90 seconds, though I also had cases when it took 20 seconds or multiple minutes.

The 'splash' boot parameter has no influence at all on this behaviour, the same things happen with the text mode prompt.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Hi Leon,

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ .

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux 580128

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

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[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Incomplete and has not had any updated comments for quite some time. As a result this bug is being closed. Please reopen if this is still an issue in the current Ubuntu development release http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ . Also, please be sure to provide any requested information that may have been missing. To reopen the bug, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

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