Comment 5 for bug 526321

Yes, plymouth should fall back to the text plugin when not given 'splash', but you may have found a problem that's specific to the text plugin so I think we want to verify whether it happens when using splash.

Also, if plymouth is running in the initramfs like it should be, it doesn't matter what start condition the upstart job lists, because the process should already be running. So there are several possible causes here, none of which are reproducible for me:

 - plymouth is not present in the initramfs
 - plymouth is failing to start in the initramfs and cryptsetup is falling back to direct prompting for decrypting the root filesystem
 - plymouth is starting, but exiting abnormally after decrypting the root filesystem
 - plymouth is failing to write out the PID file to /dev/.initramfs/plymouth.pid
 - the PID file is getting written, but isn't being transferred correctly when chrooting to the real filesystem
 - the PID file is getting written, but upstart isn't picking it up properly

Perhaps there's something you're seeing that suggests which of these is taking place, so we can narrow the search.