Comment 47 for bug 966480

> at the time the plymouth upstart jobs were written, plymouthd was
...
> correctly opening its socket before detaching from the foreground.

The fork-before-open-socket behaviour goes back to the first tag of plymouth (0.1.0). It has always been that way.

Probably the reason this problem was not noticed earlier is that the time period between execution of plymouthd and execution of plymouth was longer. Older hardware was slower, the time to start plymouth would include the time to load the executable from the CDROM or USB drive. Even on a VM it would be slower if the VM were on a harddrive. But now systems are faster, often physical PCs are booted from USB3 drives, or VMs are on SSD drives, so plymouth gets launched faster, and the race condition is more likely to be hit.