Bug 1180195 - emergency console: not installed plymouth results in inappropriate error message obfuscating genuine errors reported by journalctl -xb
Summary: emergency console: not installed plymouth results in inappropriate error mess...
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: openSUSE Tumbleweed
Classification: openSUSE
Component: Basesystem (show other bugs)
Version: Current
Hardware: All Other
: P5 - None : Normal (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Cliff Zhao
QA Contact: E-mail List
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Reported: 2020-12-17 21:26 UTC by Felix Miata
Modified: 2021-01-05 04:59 UTC (History)
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Description Felix Miata 2020-12-17 21:26:43 UTC 
Original summary:
emergency console: not installed plymouth results in inappropriate error message obfuscating genuine errors reported by journalctl -xb

Emergency session log ought not be obfuscating genuine errors by reporting error in an optional service that is purposely not installed. The following is the final message in the journal after a required filesystem failed to mount:

"Subject: Process /usr/bin/plymouth could not be executed
Defined-By: systemd
Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
The process /usr/bin/plymouth could not be executed and failed.
The error number returned by this process is ERRNO."

Yet, there are, and never were, any plymou* rpms installed.

Observed in TW 20201215.
Comment 1 Cliff Zhao 2021-01-05 02:42:31 UTC 
So I guess the full steps are: you installed TW 20201215 to your computer; then you removed all plymouth* packages; after reboot, you saw a errors in the journalctl output.
then why you failing into the Emergency console? 
You just intend to goto the here? 
or you did nothing but uninstall plymouth* packages then you only can go to Emergency console?
Comment 2 Felix Miata 2021-01-05 04:59:42 UTC 
I have more than 40 Tumbleweed installations. This was ~3 weeks ago, so I don't remember which PC this happened on. What I do remember is that fstab needed an update on account of a partitioning alteration, and I made a typo that made the root filesystem unavailable. That is what lead to the emergency console. At least one error scrolled offscreen before I could digest it, in part because the scrollback buffer disappeared after kernel 5.7, and in part because of all the useless error lines about Plymouth, which I have installed on zero of my 40+ TW installations, in addition to zero on more than double that number of Leap installations, most by selecting to taboo Plymouth at installation time.