Bug#1117589: Regression: System Hangs at Boot Until Key Press

[Chris Nospam]

Package: systemd
Version: 258-1
Severity: critical
Justification: system intermittently hangs at boot

Dear maintainers,

while booting there is from time to time a hang which shows "/dev/nvme0n1p1 clean ..." (probably the output of fsck) and there unusually shows up a blinking cursor in say 2/3 width and depth of the screen. Then with pressing once or sometimes twice a key (e.g. return) on the connected keyboard the boot completes. Otherwise the boot hangs there "forever" and from outside the machine is pingable, but you need physical access to temporarily resolve the situation.

I strongly believe this is the identical problem as in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1087616 and upstream https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/35499 . There the culprit lies in determining the terminal size by systemd. A hotfix may be to eliminate or replace the kernel parameter "quiet" from /etc/default/grub and calling update-grub . Imho we have a regression, because #1087616 was already fixed 10 month ago and now shows up again (on my machine multiple times, but not always). To tell something about the frequency, I need some more time to watch it.

As the discourse of #1087616 shows, the problem may be difficult to reproduce and to debug, but the location in systemd's code is well known, see https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/35499 .

I use a 4k display if that should play a role.

Many thanks for looking into it,
Chris