Bug#768299: grub2-common: Showing hidden Grub menu with Shift does not work

[Patrick Häcker]

Package: grub2-common
Version: 2.02~beta2-15
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

normally it's possible with Grub to use
> GRUB_TIMEOUT=0
> GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
in /etc/default/grub to have Grub hidden during normal boots with the
default boot entry being selected immediately. To my knowledge this is
also the fastest way to boot with Grub.

If you really want to select or modify some entry you can hold the shift
key while booting. Then, the menu is shown and the counter stopped.

Since some time (might be months, might be days) the shift key does not
work anymore in testing. This is an important problem if your system does
not boot anymore due to linux command line settings, which cannot be
changed, as the Grub entry cannot be modified, which could be solved with
a downloaded rescue disk, which cannot be downloaded as this is the
system providing the internet connection ...

As a workaround I set GRUB_TIMEOUT to 1 and commented GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT.
But this does increase boot time and boot flicker, so is probably not the
recommended way for Jessie.

I think I could bisect the Debian Grub packages if that would be helpful.

Kind regards
Patrick

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'stable'), (500, 'testing-proposed-updates'), (400, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.16-3-amd64 (SMP w/6 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages grub2-common depends on:
ii  dpkg                1.17.21
ii  grub-common         2.02~beta2-15
ii  install-info        5.2.0.dfsg.1-5
ii  libc6               2.19-12
ii  libdevmapper1.02.1  2:1.02.90-2
ii  liblzma5            5.1.1alpha+20120614-2

grub2-common recommends no packages.

grub2-common suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information