[bug #42976] grub2 waits forever for keystroke before booting

[Bryce Nesbitt]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?42976>

                 Summary: grub2 waits forever for keystroke before booting
                 Project: GNU GRUB
            Submitted by: brycenesbitt
            Submitted on: Wed 13 Aug 2014 10:51:12 AM PDT
                Category: Booting
                Severity: Major
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: Software Error
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: 
        Originator Email: 
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                 Release: 
                 Release: other
         Reproducibility: Intermittent
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

This is a big issue for unattended systems.  It appears the grub2 defaults,
often picked up by the distributions, will wait forever for a keystroke at
boot time.

---------------
We found three causes of the "headless server waits forever for someone to
press a key" problem with grub2 as configured by Ubuntu:

1) "apt-get updgrade" can trigger "grub-setup". If by chance there happens to
be a USB drive attached with Linux on it... grub will find it. And suddenly
you have two OS's and grub asks.
2) If a previous boot fails (for example because of a power failure in the
middle), the next boot waits forever for a keypress.
3) On a kiosk, if a visitor happens to press the shift key (or it is stuck) at
boot time, the machine won't finish the boot.

All three issues are problems for unattended/kiosk uses of Ubunu.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/797544
------------------

An improvement here would be a grub that by default boots no matter what, but
can be configured cleanly to hang instead.




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