Comment 25 for bug 1235231

During early boot, plymouth captures writes to /dev/console. As I understand it, it is supposed to re-play that content later. Whether or not it intends to is not the issue. In Ubuntu cloud-images (and in other cases) users may write data to /dev/console that needs to be seen on the other side (ie a serial logger or 'get-console-ouptput' EC2 api call).

This bug is easily reproducible on a local kvm, a cloud such as EC2 or a local lxc container. In my opinion, it should be considered "data loss". The issue is that a user cannot reliably write data to /dev/console.

See the attached 'my-logger.conf' for an upstart job that simply writes data early in boot to /dev/console. Sometimes data "lost" is available in /var/log/boot.log, but sometimes it doesn't even seem to make it there. bug 682831 (http://pad.lv/682831) has an attachment 'myhack-init' that does a similar thing but starts outputting by replacing /sbin/init and then calling /sbin/init itself.

I'd really appreciate it if someone was able to take a look at this. I'm willing to help reproduce it and can even give access to some cloud-instances that can reproduce if necessary.