Login menu appears, is then covered by errors

MNT Pocket Reform
1

IMG_20250614_115537
IMG_20250614_1155374080Ă—1884 637 KB

I can still enter my password just fine, but the login screen gets completely overwritten with text telling me about call traces and stack dumps and such. Any known fix?

2

Since the last update, I’ve had the same “problem”, albeit the errors/warnings displayed are different. Mine has errors around nvme0 (“disabling device after reset failure: -19”, etc)… but yes, the output overwriting the login text.

3

In reform-tools 1.35 (March 2024), the argument loglevel=3 was added to the kernel cmdline. This was done to fix a problem with tuigreet, which became the default greeter shortly before that. The problem was, that tuigreet renders a login prompt on the text terminal and if the kernel decides to write any other messages to the terminal, then these messages will overwrite the tuigreet login prompt. This is tracked as an upstream issue here: System messages are printed over tuigreet · Issue #68 · apognu/tuigreet · GitHub The issue was closed as “wontfix” because there is nothing tuigreet can do about this. The solution that MNT chose was to reduce the kernel’s loglevel from its default to “3” which prevented the messages messing up tuigreet from getting printed to the tty.

Recently, MNT switched its greeter from tuigreet to gdm which does not suffer from this problem. Since a big disadvantage from reducing the loglevel to “3” also was that it became much harder to debug problems, the loglevel is now back at its default value and those who decide to stick with tuigreet are affected by tuigreet issue 68 again. To work around this, you can either choose to follow any of the workaround that participants of tuigreet issue 68 suggest or you can revert the loglevel back to 3 in your own installation by adding this to your /etc/default/flash-kernel

LINUX_KERNEL_CMDLINE="loglevel=3"

and then run sudo flash-kernel to regenerate boot.scr. Or, if you are using u-boot-menu add this to your /etc/u-boot-menu/conf.d/reform.conf:

U_BOOT_PARAMETERS="ro no_console_suspend cryptomgr.notests loglevel=3 \${bootargs} console=tty1"

And run sudo u-boot-update to regenerate your /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf.

4 Likes