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Bullseye missing the startup messages (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been running systems up to Buster and have always had the 'quiet' option in the grub settings to show the regular service startup messages (the colored ones showing [ok] and such but not all the dmesg stuff). I just upgraded a server to bullseye and there are zero messages being displayed now except an immediate message about not being able to use IRQ 0. Worse, google can't seem to find any information on this. If I remove the quiet option from grub then I see those service messages again, along with all the other stuff I don't need.

What is broken and how do I fix this issue? I assumed it would be safe to upgrade by now but this seems like a pretty big problem if I ever need to troubleshoot a system.

[Edit] In case anyone else finds this post searching for the same issue… Apparently the trick is that now you MUST install plymouth, even on systems that do not have a desktop environment. For whatever reason plymouth has taken over the job of displaying the text startup messages now. Keep your same grub boot parameters (quiet by itself, without the splash option) and you will get the old format of startup messages showing once again. It’s been working fine the old way for 20+ years but hey let’s change something just for the sake of confusing everyone.

[Edit 2] Thanks to marvin below, I now have a final solution that no longer requires plymouth to be installed. Edit /etc/default/grub and add systemd.show_status=true to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. In my case to full line is:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet systemd.show_status=true"

Don't forget to run update-grub after you save your changes.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Hi.

I'm actually amazed how many people comment without having a clue what they are talking about.

What you're describing is not an issue but the fix of an issue 😃

When the kernel boots with the parameter quiet, systemd should get the option systemd.show_status=auto. With this option it should only inform about failures and such like. In current releases this finally works.

To get the old behaviour you just have to add systemd.show_status=true to your kernel parameters.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I finally had a chance to get back to this build, and wanted to thank you for this solution. It does indeed work even after removing plymouth and I'll update the OP as the best solution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting, I'll have to try that! It would be nice to not need the plymouth package installed for this functionality as it did seem rather counter-intuitive to have to install something just to see information that used to be displayed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Perhaps quiet has been made quieter. Try removing quiet and see if you get the messages you want?

I remove quiet from all my systems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sorry, last line of the first paragraph above... If I remove quiet then I get ALL of the info, the service starts as well as all the stuff you see in dmesg. I don't want the dmesg stuff, I only want the lines showing each service starting, like it did on buster.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Have you tried using an older kernel?

I had an issue simular to this and I needed to do was roll back the kernel.

Have a look on dmesq to see what's going on as that may help.

(When you do recover, upgrade to bookworm. :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's not a matter of recovering as this system is currently working just fine, it does boot up and everything runs as expected, there's just no messages showing all of the services starting (or not starting) like there should be. However, good point on the kernel rollback, 4.19 is still installed on here so let me see what that does.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So unfortunately, no, an older kernel didn't change what is happening. I would guess that reinforces my believe that it's a system setting which was changed rather than a kernel issue?

As far as upgrading to bookworm... this kind of thing is exactly the reason why I never run the current release. I literally just installed stretch from scratch (because I couldn't get a buster image to boot on this machine), dist-upgraded to buster, then when everything looked good I decided to go ahead and push it to bullseye. Nothing else has even been installed yet, the only change I made along the way was forcing all six network ports to the expected names (first using the grub and udev settings, then under bullseye I had to add files under interfaces.d). It's a clean system, apt didn't even have to ask me for permission to change any config files during the upgrades, which is the reason I immediately assumed this was a debian problem.

Regarding dmesg, I'm not sure what I should be looking for? Everything boots up fine, it's just that the system is not displaying any of the expected startup messages now. It doesn't seem like a system problem, more like an issue with the function that displays these messages is no longer outputting anything to the console.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Try upgrading or reinstalling.

(Just realized your system isn't down.)

Bookworm should fix the issue.

(Know that there's some bullseye -> bookworm hicupps.)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you have the splash option?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I do not. Does debian even HAVE a splash screen?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yes, you need to install Plymouth to see the graphical screen

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well there's your issue, Plymouth is installed by default normally (if you installed one of the desktop tasks), but you need the splash option in your boot command.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm sorry, WHY do I need the splash option? I don't want to see a splash screen when I boot up. I never have. As I said above, all I want is the service start messages without the dmesg stuff. In the past this has always been accomplished by just having the 'quiet' option so you can see as each service starts. This was working perfectly under squeeze, wheezy, jessie, stretch, and buster, they all behaved exactly the same way with only the 'quiet' option in grub. But now in bullseye something has changed, and the 'quiet' option no longer displays the startup information like it has for the last 15 years.

So my question is what do I need to change on this system which was working correctly yesterday under buster, to get it back to showing the same information when I didn't change any options and just performed a system upgrade?

[Edit] I just checked, plymouth is NOT installed on this bullseye system. Keep in mind this isn't a brand new install, and it certainly doesn't have any desktop crap installed on it. This is a straight server with just the bare minimum in place.