Comment 7 for bug 524439

On Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 04:04:54AM -0000, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> I personally don't find the console font not being set in the initrd.img
> to be such a huge issue, but I definitely NEED the keyboard map to be
> set there, if only to ensure that I don't go completely nuts whenever
> trying to rescue a system from within initrd. Honestly, expecting
> everyone to magically switch mindset to a US keyboard layout to rescue a
> system, just because someone decided to use a new bootsplash system, is
> just plain silly.

It should surely be quite obvious that this was an accidental
consequence, not a deliberate act. Please don't assume malice in the
first instance ...

It's not a consequence of moving to plymouth as such, either; it's a
consequence of rearranging the boot sequence to avoid blocking initramfs
completion on setting up the console, for boot speed. As I think I made
clear in my previous message, though, it is not really the fault of the
boot speed work, but rather an inherent fragility in the system due to a
kernel limitation, which we were unlucky enough to run into.

The initramfs is already supposed to be set up to set the keymap on
panic, so that you have a working keymap in a rescue shell. If that
isn't working for you, can you file a separate bug about it? It isn't
really the same as this bug.

> Thus the only half-decent solution really is to split keyboard map and
> vcons font setting to two different stages.

They already are two different stages; it's just that neither of them is
working! However, in order to fix this bug (either the one in the bug
description, or the separate problem you report), they don't actually
need to be separate; since nowadays all the necessary data is available
in /etc (thanks to setupcon --save), we can set up both keymap and font
before telling plymouth to show its splash screen.

The font might not matter to you, but it certainly matters to anyone
whose keymap emits characters not in the default VGA font. Even if you
don't need those characters very much when rescuing a system, it's a lot
less confusing if you don't get utter garbage on your screen if you
press the "wrong" key.