My LEAP 15 Desktop was update from 42.3 using zypper dup procedure.
Nothing seemed unusual as the update proceeded.
The boot process takes a very long time buy openSUSE standards, something fails and I am dumped to a level 3 console.
I login as root, issue init 5 and system immediately displays a Greeter and login from there as user proceeds normally.
Once up, system seems very responsive and all functionality tried so far is fine.
I did pull this info after hacking about in various Forum items
I have no idea where else to look for info on what is going on during boot.
Is there a way to monitor the console during boot, i.e. un-hide it from behind the “bouncing diamond above down carot” screen?
Sorry, not much to go on, but I am unsure what would be useful information.
The easiest way is to hit the ESC key as soon as you see that graphic.
However: I had a similar problem for one of my installs. And hitting ESC did not reveal the problem.
Another option: On the boot menu, hit the ‘e’ key. That gets you into an editor window to edit the boot commands.
Scroll down until you find a line starting “linux” (or might be “linuxefi”). Perhaps hit the END key to get to the end of that line. But then back up a little. Find the string “splash=silent” and remove that string. Then continue booting (CTRL-X).
That should give more detail. That’s how I found the problem on my one system that had difficulties. (It was doing a 90 second delay waiting for a file system that was never going to show up – essentially the same problem as in bug 1071354).
Well, that was interesting.
I went the splash=verbose route.
The time from entering my HDD crypto password to Greeter screen was maybe 3 seconds.
Fast enough for me.
I guess that says my problem was a Plymouth hang, …?
BTW, ESC was not working, likely because it was already hung when I tried it.
Thanks for your help
Plymouth can be a PIA at times. I have long since quit using it.
Instead, on each install, I remove Plymouth entirely and taboo it.
However, I do that less for the Plymouth problems and more for the sense of “awesome” watching the scrolling lines to see what openSUSE is doing during those seconds of boot time.
As splash= is an optional kernel parameter, splash=verbose equates to splash=0, as well as the null string nrickert “applied”. I don’t know whether it directly affects Plymouth at all, since I never have it installed, but any of those equivalents turn off the boot message suppression that splash=silent causes.
In my case, I’m pretty sure that plymouth is still running, but it isn’t showing its splash screen. So I see the boot messages. These include a message that password requests (for crypto) are being passed to plymouth.
It is probably a plymouth bug. I’m pretty sure that there are several plymouth bugs open at the bugzilla. Some people are more affected than others, which probably depends on the graphics card.
