/etc/default/grub and boot message verbosity

Hi,

The ‘quiet’ option in /etc/default/grub suppresses all boot messages and shows only errors on startup. When I remove this option, I get a real tsunami of boot messages.

On RHEL/CentOS, the ‘quiet’ startup option strikes a nice balance and shows me every service that starts. On OpenSUSE Leap 15, there seems to be no middle ground between everything and nothing.

Is there a way to have a reasonable amount of startup messages on Leap 15 ?

Cheers,

Niki

As I see it.

Those messages about starting services are created by systemd. Thus the Grub parameter is somewhere translated to systemd options. Thus try to find out how the Grub parameter is translated on RHEL/CentOS (apparenly you have it available somewhere, I haven’t).

I’ve found the following boot parameters to be useful:

loglevel=4 systemd.show_status=auto

This instructs systemd to show only the »unusual« messages. In my case, almost none.

After every NVidia update, a file named »nvidia-logind-acl-trick.conf« generates some spurious messages, and I’m reminded that above settings work for me as intended.

That’s about what I am seeing with Leap 15.

On the kernel command line, I am using “quiet plymouth.enable=0”

The output is mostly lines like “Starting …”, “Reached Target …”, “Stopped …”.

Thanks for your numerous suggestions. I experimented some more, and here’s a perfect solution.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset \
                            plymouth.enable=0 \
                            quiet \
                            loglevel=3 \
                            systemd.show_status=1 \
                            vga=791 \
                            ipv6.disable=1 \
                            showopts"

Cheers,

Niki

Note that nomodeset will make the vast majority of FOSS-only users unhappy. It disables KMS, which all FOSS drivers for AMD, Intel and NVidia GPUs require.

showopts its inert unless your bootloader is Grub Legacy.

vga= functions only until the kernel sets a display mode based on EDID.

I like to see what’s happening during boot, reminds me I’m not using Windows, so quiet and splash=silent are both absent, and plymouth isn’t even installed. :slight_smile: