Bug#741464: grub-pc-bin: hangs after displaying boot menu

[Jeroen Dekkers]

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 17:57:20 +0200 Sven Joachim <svenjoac at gmx.de> wrote:
> On 2014-10-13 16:25 +0200, Colin Watson wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 08:24:31PM +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:
> >> After upgrading the grub packages and rebooting my laptop, grub
> >> displayed the boot menu and then was hung.  The countdown before
> >> booting the default kernel was not started and grub did not accept any
> >> keyboard input.
> >> 
> >> I had to boot a rescue system from a USB stick, chroot into my
> >> installation and downgrade to 2.00-22 to get back to a working system.
> >
> > Sorry for the delay in replying to this.  Could you please post the
> > output of:
> >
> >   sudo debconf-show grub-pc
> >
> > ?  Is there anything else interesting about your system, since this is
> > not something I can reproduce?
> 
> I have diverted /sbin/update-grub to maintain /boot/grub/grub.cfg by
> hand, as you suggested in bug #578576.  Therefore the debconf data are
> probably not too interesting.
> 
> > Bearing in mind the period of time
> > involved, it might also be worth trying with 2.02~beta2-14 now that you
> > have rescue media to hand.
> 
> I have managed to install 2.02~beta2-15 on a USB stick which is much
> easier to recover, and the offending command which causes grub to freeze
> is "terminal_input at_keyboard", which I have been using for obtaining a
> German keyboard layout (see #686817 on that matter; I'm sure there was
> an even older bug, but cannot find it now).  If I remove that statement,
> grub works.  From the grub command line I can "insmod at_keyboard"
> without problems, but "terminal_input at_keyboard" freezes grub.

I tried to reproduce this in a virtual machine (using kvm), but under
kvm everything seems to work fine including the german keyboard
layout. When I tried it on real hardware I could reproduce the
problem, but instead of freezing I got garbage input after switching
terminal_input to at_keyboard.


Kind regards,

Jeroen Dekkers