Nixpkgs: add option for silent boot

[davidak]

Issue description

I don't want to see the boot messages on my desktop systems. The Login manager should appear directly after the Grub menu (when there are no critical errors).

I tried several things like:

  # less verbose boot log
  boot.consoleLogLevel = 3;
  boot.kernelParams = [ "quiet" "udev.log_priority=3" ];

and

  boot.loader.grub.extraConfig = "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=\"quiet loglevel=3 vga=current\"";

It has no effect.

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/silent_boot

Steps to reproduce

Have NixOS system with Grub 2.

Technical details

• system: "x86_64-linux"
• host os: Linux 4.9.66, NixOS, 17.09.2281.b4a0c011e81 (Hummingbird)
• multi-user?: yes
• sandbox: yes
• version: nix-env (Nix) 1.11.15
• nixpkgs: /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixpkgs

[davidak]

Ubuntu uses Plymouth.

It can get enabled in NixOS but looks broken (that is another issue).

  boot.plymouth.enable = true;

Should we enable it by default for any displayManager?

[michaelpj]

It's also the case that the default Plymouth theme is incredibly ugly (I'm reluctant to make it the default while it is so). I've been meaning to submit a PR to make the default a nicer one, I should get around to that.

[davidak]

A NixOS theme would be nice.

There are also others that can get packaged.

Tux:
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1189328/
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1000026/

this would be nice for apple devices: https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1009320/

Windows boot screens are funny:
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1202357/
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1202116/

[michaelpj]

I packaged a nice one from KDE-land that works with NixOS branding, just need to make it available by default.

[gnidorah]

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/32578

[michaelpj]

That still doesn't do anything about the stage 1 messages, though.

[gnidorah]

Yep. /cc @abbradar Also https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/32556

[ghost]

It seems that only messages from systemd are hidden if quiet and loglevel=4 are present in the kernel parameters with quiet mentioned before loglevel=4 as mentioned here. However, I'm not sure whether the NixOS configuration option boot.consoleLogLevel ensures that quiet is present before loglevel=4 is appended.
Moreover, as @michaelpj mentioned, I'm also not sure how I can hide the non-critical NixOS Stage 1 and NixOS Stage 2 messages.

[ghost]

The description of the boot.consoleLogLevel option should also be changed from ... a priority numerically less than ... to ... a priority numerically greater than ....

[bricewge]

Theses messages come from /nixos/modules/system/boot/stage-1-init.sh and /nixos/modules/system/boot/stage-2-init.sh. So it'll show up even with:

  boot.kernelParams = [ "quiet" ];
  boot.consoleLogLevel = 0;

We probably need to patch those scripts to not use echo but a logging function where the verbosity can be controlled.

[stale[bot]]

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[peterhoeg]

We probably need to patch those scripts to not use echo but a logging function where the verbosity can be controlled.

That's what I did locally but I really shoudl clean that up and upstream it.

[p4block]

I tried to set up quiet boot but still got the stage1 logging, thankfully I quickly encountered this post :+1:

I found the patch to the initrd sh script in your nixpkgs fork @peterhoeg, thanks a lot. I'll be stealing that for the moment.

Should be enough to get lazy fbcon init to work, which would allow keeping the grub splash image until getty or the DM start.