no fsck messages shown in details mode (no splash on cmdline)

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical)]

Binary package hint: plymouth

Tried booting in details mode (removed splash from cmdline) and didn't get any fsck messages, despite /forcefsck - need to investigate this as they should be visible

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

This may be related to the details plugin never opening the terminal ;-)

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

Maybe fixed, if that's the cause

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

The presumed fix was in the 0.8.1-1 upload - is it really fixed?

[Noel J. Bergman (noeljb)]

See also bug 549824. You won't get fsck messages if fsck isn't being executed.

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

Confirmed as still being an issue

[Malcolm Scott (malcscott)]

Possibly related to bug 563916, for which I've just submitted a patch? (The details plugin doesn't support display_message at all.)

[Mark - Syminet (mark-syminet)]

Still no progress bar in Precise... possible xref bug 765735

[Clint Byrum (clint-fewbar)]

This affects server users pretty badly.. a long FSCK could be running for a while with no feedback to the technician waiting on it. Raising to High. The reason for this is that the details plugin does not implement on_boot_progress, which is used by mountall to send progress updates from fsck to plymouth.

[auquicu (aebsbkrs)]

Yes - after two hours still "Press C to cancel all checks in progress". Zero feedback.
There is no choice but to press C - no way to know whether the system is hung or doing something.

[Mark - Syminet (mark-syminet)]

Regarding this, I rebuilt a mountall package that fixed this bug and uploaded it to my PPA about two years ago.

I added the "--fsck-console" option to mountall, and then added the option to enable this at boot time by adding the line "FSCKCONSOLE=yes" to /etc/defaults/rcS. From the changelog:

   * Added "--fsck-console" parameter to use console progress bar. To
     enable, add "FSCKCONSOLE=yes" to /etc/defaults/rcS.

My PPA package is still sitting on Launchpad here: https://launchpad.net/~mark-syminet/+archive/syminet/+packages

If this seems a good approach, I'm willing to spend the time to take a look at this again but only if someone is willing to consider getting it into the distribution, since I only want to use distribution packages on servers for critical boot-things like this.

This really is a particularly nasty bug because servers can run for a long time without a power cut, etc. - but then that fateful day arrives and we are stuck without any idea if the remote machine is even hung, while bosses and customers are screaming about downtime demanding ETA's.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package plymouth - 0.8.8-0ubuntu11

---------------
plymouth (0.8.8-0ubuntu11) trusty; urgency=low

  * Implement update status (U) splash plugin function for details plugin,
    simply display those updates as text messages. (LP: #540645)
 -- Dmitrijs Ledkovs <email address hidden> Wed, 04 Dec 2013 12:36:46 +0000

[Mark - Syminet (mark-syminet)]

Fixed.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

The Precise Pangolin has reached end of life, so this bug will not be fixed for that release