Comment 21 for bug 778520

Excerpts from piwacet's message of Thu Sep 29 00:10:40 UTC 2011:
> OK figured it out.
>
> If I understand this right, this bug remains fixed in Oneiric.
>
> I tested this in a KVM machine, which shows early-boot console output
> that virtualbox does not. When I remove a drive in KVM, I'm given a
> choice to boot the degraded raid, or drop to a shell. After a timeout,
> it automatically drops to the shell; if I choose 'y' before the timeout,
> it boots the degraded raid.
>
> The problem with virtualbox is that it does not show this early console
> output. But the process proceeds correctly: if in virtualbox I remove a
> drive, boot, and wait a bit, and then blindly press 'y' and enter at the
> still-blank screen, it boots to the degraded raid. If I press enter
> only (selecting the default to drop to a shell), then 'reboot', then
> enter, it reboots. None if this is visible on the screen, that's the
> only problem. If I do boot to the degraded raid, the console output
> becomes visible as it nears the end of the boot process.
>
> So the problem I was experiencing has nothing to do with this bug. It
> seems to be simply virtualbox not displaying console output until very
> late in a successful boot process. Don't know why it does this.
>
> So apologies for the noise, but hopefully this can be helpful if someone
> else runs into this problem in a virtualbox VM.
>

piwacet, thanks for the detailed testing and confirmation that the fix has
indeed worked. I would suggest opening a bug with Virtualbox about this
problem. Its entirely possible that our kernel or their virtualization
env is doing something terribly wrong early in the boot... its pretty
important that initramfs be visible to users.