Bug 831850

Summary:	Boot loader VGA mode "8-pixel font" gives unbootable system
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 12.3	Reporter:	Volker Kuhlmann <bugz57>
Component:	YaST2	Assignee:	Michael Chang <mchang>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	snwint
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:	SILVER
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Volker Kuhlmann 2013-07-29 05:25:57 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.34 (KHTML, like Gecko) konqueror/4.7.2 Safari/534.34

Yast -> boot loader -> Details
There is a drop-down box offering various video modes.
Selecting "Standard 8-pixel font" causes vga=extended to be appended to the kernel command line.
On reboot, grub2 dies with
"text is deprecated. Use set gfxpayload=vga=extended before linux  command instead"
and the system becomes unbootable.

Recovery is possible by editing the grub2 entry (press "e") and removing/correcting the offending vga= setting.
This is real fun to do with some script being badly displayed inside a micro-view area designed by a graphics designer without regard for usability, not helped by grub2 needing screenfuls of lafaffel for the same job grub did in one easily editable line...

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start yast boor loader
2. Go into loader details
3. Select VGA mode "Standard 8-pixel font"
Actual Results:  
System fails to boot.

Expected Results:  
Yast should not create boot laoder configurations that leave a non-bootable system. A warning would be appropriate.

Comment 1 Michael Chang 2015-02-02 09:39:33 UTC

12.3 has reached it's end of life, so I closed this one.

That displayed message is actually an warning and system should be boot-able (at least it works for my tests). It is translated to gfxpayload=text internally and passed to kernel.

So reopen if you still have the unbootable problem in factory or 13.2 and probably kernel as the owner.