Bug 23902

Summary:	For some hardware the Live iso boot menu selections are hidden
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	Len Lawrence <tarazed25>
Component:	Release (media or process)	Assignee:	ISO building group <isobuild>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Normal	CC:	mageia, marja11
Version:	Cauldron	Keywords:	7beta1
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:		CVE:
Status comment:

Description Len Lawrence 2018-11-26 02:43:44 CET

Description of problem:
This may be apply to a narrow range of hardware only.  The specific case is is a workstation with an Intel i9 Decacore CPU, nvidia GTX 1080Ti graphics and a 3K monitor on an HDMI connection.  More often than not, the boot menu is overlaid with a black panel like that used for editing the boot options, which prevents anything but the default selection being used.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
Mageia7 Live any DE

How reproducible:
On almost all attempts to boot

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use the BIOS to boot a live iso on a USB device
2. Note that in most cases the boot menu will be obscured
3.

Comment 1 Marja Van Waes 2018-11-26 09:05:31 CET

Do you mind adding a screenshot? (I'm not sure I understand this report)

Keywords: (none) => 7beta1
CC: sysadmin-bugs => marja11
Assignee: bugsquad => isobuild

Comment 2 Len Lawrence 2018-11-26 10:52:41 CET

OK.  I shall get my camera out - have not used it for months so it will probably be tomorrow.

Comment 3 Len Lawrence 2018-11-26 14:48:13 CET

Looks like it is not possible.  The timing is too tight - the menu comes up with the black panel obscuring most of it but the default boot kicks in long before I can use the camera.  There is no way to pause the process.  

What happens is that when booting from the iso the grub2 boot menu is presented, with four choices.  On the test system this menu is immediately obscured by the aforesaid black panel, which also seems to prevent the up/down arrow keys from having any effect; in other words preventing a choice over the selection.

To get a screenshot I would need at least 30 seconds grace, preferably a minute or two.  I can't see Martin generating a special iso just for this case but I would suggest a longer timeout.  We are not all game players.

Comment 4 Martin Whitaker 2018-11-26 19:39:45 CET

IIRC, this also happened with the 6.1 ISOs. We concluded that your BIOS was leaving the Enter keypress in the keyboard buffer. GRUB reads it and immediately selects the default menu entry. The black rectangle is what I normally see on UEFI boot before the kernel takes over the EFI frame buffer. So it won't matter how big I make the timeout (which is currently set to 10 seconds).

CC: (none) => mageia

Comment 5 Len Lawrence 2018-11-27 00:34:06 CET

Thanks Martin for reminding me about the hanging Enter - had forgotten about that (definitely senile).  And that led to using the mouse instead of the keyboard.

So this bug is INVALID.

Comment 6 Len Lawrence 2018-11-27 00:37:21 CET

This cause of this problem had already been tentatively understood.

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => INVALID