I am going to try to document the problems that I, and apparently a few others, are having in booting karmic. There do not appear to be any fixes for any of this coming down the update pipe, so I am hoping that someone a little more familiar with the guts of the bootup process than I am has some ideas where to start attacking this.
Before listing the problems themselves, here are the relevant lines from /boot/grub/grub.cfg:
Note that there are no vga= or splash codes in these lines; I have removed all of that in trying to debug this.
1. When trying to boot normally, a series of video error screens appear. The first one says it can't load fonts. Escaping out of that screen brings up the "Low Resolution" screen. Escaping or Canceling that screen goes back to the text screen, then a short while later, the boot screen appears. It appears that this problem is due to kdm starting before the video drivers actually load. I believe this is true because on my system, the fans on my video cards run at full speed until the driver (proprietary NVIDIA 190.42) loads. During the boot process, the fans are running at full speed during the error screens; after that, they slow down just before the login screen appears.
2. Can't log in to the "rescue" mode. After starting rescue mode, the usual text runs up to the "looking for resume device" point. After that, the fsck stuff appears. Then the screen goes blank, and the two error screens about video mode come up! [That's not supposed to happen, the whole point of "rescue mode" is to run without X!] Clicking out of those screen brings up the rescue mode menu, which then gets immediately overwritten by other text. The "root@machinename" prompt appears, but after hitting Enter, the "Machinename Login:" prompt then appaears. It is impossible to use the console, because it seems to be alternating between the two prompts. Only functional option at this point is CTRL-ALT-DEL.
3. My conclusion from all this is that when trying to log in, there are in fact two separate login processes running in parallel. One of them starts kdm before the video driver appears, and runs no matter whether one chooses normal login or rescue mode. This is the broken process, and may have something to do with comments I read about wanting to start kdm "earlier in the boot process" as a way of getting away from usplash.
Note that this stuff all seems to be working in lucid, or at least in what is available of it in the repositories. There are other broken things. but bootup seems to go fast and correctly.
This problem does not appear to be directly related to the kernel itself, because it occurs when trying to boot older kernels. This problem appeared shortly before the Karmic release date, and now affects older kernels released before then. So I'm guessing it's something in an init script somewhere, or upstart, or who-knows-what.
I hope maybe someone can fill in the who-knows-what part, as I don't even know what to try to file a bug report on.
Edit: One thing I forgot, it does not seem to be related to sreadahead, as the problems are both there whether sreadahead is installed or removed.
Before listing the problems themselves, here are the relevant lines from /boot/grub/grub.cfg:
Code:
### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ###
menuentry "Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-15-generic" {
recordfail=1
if [ -n ${have_grubenv} ]; then save_env recordfail; fi
set quiet=1
insmod ext2
set root=(hd0,1)
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set f46c4955-3e0a-4069-92ec-8c2b4655e481
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-15-generic root=UUID=f46c4955-3e0a-4069-92ec-8c2b4655e481 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-15-generic
}
menuentry "Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-15-generic (recovery mode)" {
recordfail=1
if [ -n ${have_grubenv} ]; then save_env recordfail; fi
insmod ext2
set root=(hd0,1)
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set f46c4955-3e0a-4069-92ec-8c2b4655e481
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-15-generic root=UUID=f46c4955-3e0a-4069-92ec-8c2b4655e481 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-15-generic
1. When trying to boot normally, a series of video error screens appear. The first one says it can't load fonts. Escaping out of that screen brings up the "Low Resolution" screen. Escaping or Canceling that screen goes back to the text screen, then a short while later, the boot screen appears. It appears that this problem is due to kdm starting before the video drivers actually load. I believe this is true because on my system, the fans on my video cards run at full speed until the driver (proprietary NVIDIA 190.42) loads. During the boot process, the fans are running at full speed during the error screens; after that, they slow down just before the login screen appears.
2. Can't log in to the "rescue" mode. After starting rescue mode, the usual text runs up to the "looking for resume device" point. After that, the fsck stuff appears. Then the screen goes blank, and the two error screens about video mode come up! [That's not supposed to happen, the whole point of "rescue mode" is to run without X!] Clicking out of those screen brings up the rescue mode menu, which then gets immediately overwritten by other text. The "root@machinename" prompt appears, but after hitting Enter, the "Machinename Login:" prompt then appaears. It is impossible to use the console, because it seems to be alternating between the two prompts. Only functional option at this point is CTRL-ALT-DEL.
3. My conclusion from all this is that when trying to log in, there are in fact two separate login processes running in parallel. One of them starts kdm before the video driver appears, and runs no matter whether one chooses normal login or rescue mode. This is the broken process, and may have something to do with comments I read about wanting to start kdm "earlier in the boot process" as a way of getting away from usplash.
Note that this stuff all seems to be working in lucid, or at least in what is available of it in the repositories. There are other broken things. but bootup seems to go fast and correctly.
This problem does not appear to be directly related to the kernel itself, because it occurs when trying to boot older kernels. This problem appeared shortly before the Karmic release date, and now affects older kernels released before then. So I'm guessing it's something in an init script somewhere, or upstart, or who-knows-what.
I hope maybe someone can fill in the who-knows-what part, as I don't even know what to try to file a bug report on.
Edit: One thing I forgot, it does not seem to be related to sreadahead, as the problems are both there whether sreadahead is installed or removed.
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