Ubuntu

Plymouth with cryptroot endangers OLED screens

Asked by Axel Kittenberger

Hi guys, following issue, with the advent of OLED screens, possible burnins and protection against becomes an issue again.

The issue is, if having a cryptroot plymouth will halt to ask for the encyrption passphrase for root, however it will relentlessy display this without going to blank screen ever (or repositioning the contents of the screen after a short while). And to make it worse it does this while having brightness at maximum setting also closing the lid.. it will keep burning in the Logo into OLED screen.

I know things are a little difficult at this boot stage, as advanced interfaces (changing screen brightness, detecting lid closes) etc. are not there yet. Also I doubt its possible at this stage to detect if the screen is an OLED.

However IMO something must be done, I had almost permanent damage becase in my case Windows auto-restartet due to sofware update, and then booted by default into Ubuntu, where it will keep hanging on cryptroot question in Plymouth and cause burn in.

I suggest blanking the screen after say 180 seconds and coming back with a keystroke. Or even more radical going into power off after say 10 minutes if no cryptroot password is given (might also be an issue the notebook being in a backpack and getting into this nasty state).

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Bernard Stafford (bernard010) said (last edit ): 		#1

Plymouth package is a boot animation, logger.
cryptroot is not an Ubuntu package nor is it part of any Plymouth packages.
Plymouth can be deactivated if needed.
https://daniel-montalvo.com/blogs/disable-plymouth/
Decrypt passphrase for the hard drive.
The only password needed to login is at the login screen for Ubuntu.
You can skip that screen and auto-login using this setting:
https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/ubuntu-help/user-autologin.html.en
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/?s=hibernate

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Axel Kittenberger (axkibe) said : 		#2

Sorry no, this is default Ubuntu if you chose to encrypt your root parition during the installer, which is by the way strongly recommended by EU data protection laws.

And since it is encryped any auto-login cannot work, since the root parition is encrypted.

Sorry to say, this was not useful at all.

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Axel Kittenberger (axkibe) said : 		#3

PS: the respective ubuntu packages are called "cryptsetup, cryptsetup-bin and cryptsetup-initramfs".

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Axel Kittenberger (axkibe) said : 		#5

I thought that was clear when I said "cryptroot" (= the root partition is encrypted), anyway..

This does not solve the problem, that the question for the decryption passphrase potentially destroys OLED screens, because there is no screen timeout.

I don't know how to describe the issue more clearly.

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Axel Kittenberger (axkibe) said : 		#7

Removing encryption is not a solution. In my case it is necessary.
Sorry to sound Karen. but can you please get someone else to review this?

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#8

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

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Axel Kittenberger (axkibe) said : 		#9

It's still an issue tough.

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#10

This seems not to be Ubuntu-specific, but a (missing?) feature of plymouth itself.
Maybe you can get answers at the upstream source of plymouth, https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/plymouth/plymouth

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Axel Kittenberger (axkibe) said : 		#11

Yes and no, I can try to go to upstream instead, but i'm pretty sure they will say that plymouth is only a question asker and any kind of these things is part of the distro (they dont know anything of cryptroot for example, for them it's just a question that has been told them to ask)

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