Intermittent hang at LUKS password prompt

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

I have noticed that on some boots when I get to the disk unlock prompt, the system will seem to completely freeze during password entry. I cannot hit backspace to clear characters, or type the rest of my password. The prompt remains unresponsive.

This seemed to begin to happen (or at least I began to notice it) after I added Plymouth for boot splashes at startup.
To troubleshoot, I added an additional boot entry to start the system without the splash and it is also affected.

I can get around this by rebooting the system a time or two. If I can manage to enter my password completely, the rest of the bootup proceeds without issue.

The affected system is a Lenovo Yoga Thinkpad 11e Gen 6 and I am using systemd-boot for startup.
I have done some searching around but most of the hits I have found for hangs with LUKS are it not finding the appropriate disk or similar.

Any help is appreciated.

2

Well, considering I suspected something with Plymouth, I went ahead and ripped it out.
The specific package was plymouth-git from the AUR.

After uninstalling and testing, I didn’t have any issues with the boot password prompt.
I reinstalled plymouth-git and so far still no issues even after rebooting a number of times.

Fingers crossed that did the trick…

3

Is there a reason you are using the -git version?

You should expect breakage when using those packages.

4

Not particularly. I’ve been playing around and learning things along the way.
Breaking and unbreaking my system is just part of the fun.

If you say that’s a likely source of trouble then I’ll switch back to the regular package.

5

Anything from the AUR is a fairly likely source of trouble.

Anything from the AUR for which there is an official package is an all-around certified bad idea unless you have a very clear need for functionality unique to the AUR version.

6

Although there is no consistent rule. *-git packages generally pull the latest source code. This is usually unreleased code that may or may not have been properly tested.

Unless you absolutely need some brand new feature that hasn’t been released yet or are wanting to help test the latest code, it is better to avoid those packages.

7

I switched back over to regular Plymouth package last night.
I got home from work today and fired up the laptop and it started doing the same thing again.

I thought that it might be an issue with the Plymouth theme, so I reverted to default, rebuilt with Dracut, and the issues occurred even on the stock theme.

I kept playing around with it, removing and reinstalling Plymouth, and it seems to have settled back down for now. At this point I’m pretty certain that Plymouth is the culprit for the boot hangs.

Any ideas on further troubleshooting if this reoccurs?

8

In case anyone else runs into this post later on down the line, I have encountered these same issues on Arch Linux as well, not just EndeavourOS. I figure I will go over there to request additional help instead.