Enabling plymouth hides ZFS password prompt

[ElvishJerricco]

Issue description

Enabling the boot.plymouth.enable option on a system with a ZFS root with encryption enabled will cause the password prompt to be hidden at boot. You can still blindly type the password in, but this is not obvious.

Technical details

We do have something for LUKS, but it seems ZFS prompts at a different time in the lifecycle.

As an aside, plymouth does have an option for prompting for a password graphically. It'd be neat if we could use this for encrypted file systems. Then we could hide all text output and just show the splash.

[jtojnar]

For the record, it does not show the graphical prompt with LUKS either: #26722

[infinisil]

I just ran into this when I enabled encryption yesterday. I discussed potential solutions with @samueldr on IRC. The most elegant imo would be to restructure the initrd script into something similar to activationScripts, where you can set dependencies between phases, preferably using @rycee's DAG library.

[cleverca22]

2 solutions for this:
1: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Plymouth#A.22plymouth_ask-for-password.22
2:

[root@amd-nixos:~]# plymouth --help
 show-splash        Tell daemon to show splash screen
 hide-splash        Tell daemon to hide splash screen

you can just hide/show the splash, to let the text console prompt things

[stale]

Thank you for your contributions.

This has been automatically marked as stale because it has had no activity for 180 days.

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[cole-h]

I believe #88789 will fix this once it's merged. I just rebooted my system and found that I was not using that branch, because there was no prompt and I had to blindly enter my password. However, using that branch, I was prompted for my password via plymouth as one would hope/expect.

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[nh2]

Still important to me

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[misuzu]

Bump.

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[betaboon]

Still important to me

[Majiir]

This is now working on nixos-unstable (after #179619 merged) as long as you also set boot.initrd.systemd.enable = true in your config. Fair warning, that option says:

Note: This is in very early development and is highly experimental. Most of the features NixOS supports in initrd are not yet supported by the intrd generated with this option.

[ElvishJerricco]

That note as it's currently written is a little outdated. It's definitely still experimental, but I wouldn't say highly experimental anymore. Quite a few of us actually daily drive it with a variety of fancy initrd use cases. And at this point we do actually support most of what the old scripted initrd supports; we're pretty much just missing networking (#169116 is near completion for that), and some of the fancier LUKS options.

[Majiir]

Closing this as completed. For future readers, ZFS+Plymouth works if you set boot.initrd.systemd.enable = true. This enables the systemd initrd, which replaces the older script-based stage 1 initrd.

See #26722 for a similar issue about LUKS+Plymouth.

[ElvishJerricco]

@Majiir I disagree with closing this. Systemd initrd is still marked experimental and is not feature complete. The default initrd in NixOS has this issue.