Plymouth is missing label-pango.so and label-freetype.so

[suce]

Plymouth is not displaying the luks password prompt. The log says:

Could not load module "/usr/lib64/plymouth/label-pango.so": /usr/lib64/plymouth/label-pango.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Could not load module "/usr/lib64/plymouth/label-freetype.so": /usr/lib64/plymouth/label-freetype.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The package plymouth-plugin-label is installed. The lib label-pango.so does exist in /usr/lib64/plymouth so I guess it’s only missing in the initramfs. The lib label-freetype.so is nowhere to be found.

[pavinjoseph]

Hi there

Perhaps try reinstalling the package that provides the library and regenerating initramfs.

# find package containing library
zypper se --file-list --match-words label-pango.so
# reinstall package
sudo zypper in --force plymouth-plugin-label
# regenerate initramfs
sudo dracut --regenerate-all --force

[suce]

Hey,

Thanks for your reply. Zypper can’t find label-freetype.so anywhere.
I’ve reinstalled plymouth-plugin-label, regenerate the initramfs, but no success.

# lsinitrd /boot/initrd | grep label
gives no result

I’ve checked on arch and debian: the former only has a label.so while the later has label-pango.so and label-freetype.so.

It looks like 2 separate issues: label-freetype is simply missing and plymouth-dracut forgets to embed some libs into the initramfs. Another thing that is weird, the .so files in /usr/lib64/plymouth have 755 permissions (no idea why they are executable).

[suce]

I’ve manually added label-pango.so (and some fonts) to the initramfs:

file: /etc/dracut.conf.d/98-addfiles.conf
install_items+="/usr/lib64/plymouth/label-pango.so /usr/share/fonts/Plymouth.ttf /usr/share/fonts/Plymouth-monospace.ttf"

The text is now displayed at boot and the debug log is happy (not even mentioning label-freetype.so anymore)

[pavinjoseph]

@suce

Thanks for your reply. Zypper can’t find label-freetype.so anywhere.

Neither on my machine with the default repos.

@suce

Another thing that is weird, the .so files in /usr/lib64/plymouth have 755 permissions (no idea why they are executable).

Apparently just an artifact of build scripts:

Why are shared libraries executable?

@suce

I’ve manually added label-pango.so (and some fonts) to the initramfs:

Did that solve it?

[suce]

@pavinjoseph

Did that solve it?

Yep. I guess only label-pango.so was missing in the initramfs. It now works perfectly. Thanks

[pavinjoseph]

Nice, maybe open a bugzilla report so it can be fixed for everyone.
I use FDE and have plymouth too but did not run into this issue as I have auto unlock on restarting:

How to automatically unlock LUKS encrypted root filesystem

Hello everyone, I have a fairly standard/default LUKS encrypted volume with swap and btrfs root filesystem residing in it. The subvolumes are in their standard layout too. Only change I’ve made is to add an ext4 partition to store kdump. pavin@suse-pc:~> lsblk -f /dev/nvme0n1 NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS nvme0n1 …

[hui]

label-freetype.so is in package plymouth-plugin-label-ft

[suce]

It seems that, at some point, label.so was split into label-pango and label-freetype. The dracut hook was probably trying to include label.so into the initramfs, which doesn’t exist anymore.

For the record, if both pango and freetype are present, pango seems to be used. Freetype gives a much better font display for OpenType fonts. The kerning with pango is horrible.