[Bug 765735] Re: mountall should cause fsck to show progress on text console

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 01:04:44PM -0000, Mark - Syminet wrote:
> TL;DR please give your users an exact explanation as to why you made
> plymouth such a strong dependency.

This explanation has been given repeatedly in bug reports.  Which just goes
to show why launchpad bugs are the wrong place to give such explanations,
because nobody reads them.  But ok, I'll try once more.

The misunderstanding here is that you are viewing plymouth as a "boot
splash".  It is not.  It is a boot-time I/O serializer.  This is an absolute
requirement on a system with a fast event-based boot like upstart, because
without it you can never reliably interact with the system at boot time -
interaction that's needed for processes like fsck, and cryptsetup.  You have
one console, and N fscks that may be running in parallel, and you need to be
darned sure that your keypresses are controlling the right process.

That's why having fsck spit output directly to the console is not a suitable
solution.  And the fact that the display of the plymouth splash screen can
be toggled at runtime is why having a config file to control where mountall
sends it output is not suitable either.

Now, in addition to multiplexing we also care about users having a
nice-looking boot experience, which is why the graphical splash is the
default (and has been since long before plymouth was around) and most of the
engineering work has been around making the graphical experience work
smoothly.  This unfortunately means that some things don't work as well when
using the details plugin - such as this issue described here.  But that's a
priority because of server, not because desktop users might opt out of the
graphical splash when it's working.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/765735

Title:
  mountall should cause fsck to show progress on text console

Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: mountall

  mountall should cause fsck to show progress information (-C 0).

  Especially on large FS that take very long to fsck (sometimes many hours) it is very important 
  to know that the fsck isn't actually hanging and still working.
  It is not possible to log in via console or ssh to check the status even for filesystems that are not boot- essential.

  Plymouth splash screen is disabled as this machine is a server.

  This behaviour has caused trouble several times already as the system
  was believed to be hanging and unresponsive and got rebooted while the
  fsck was still running.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
  Package: mountall 2.25ubuntu1
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
  Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Tue Apr 19 11:51:06 2011
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Beta amd64 (20100901.1)
  ProcEnviron:
   SHELL=/bin/bash
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   LANGUAGE=en_US:en
  SourcePackage: mountall
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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