Grub2 Booting in blind mode due to "invalid video mode specification `text'"

You're mentioning 14.04 here; elsewhere it's only question of 16.04. Is this patch really needed on 14.04 as well?

Marking Fix Released for other releases; the patch is already provided in Bionic and above.

I was not clear about the lifecycle of 16.04 and 14.04. :-)

AFAIK, there is no real need to fix the bug for 14.04.
And I understand it looks there won't be a 16.04.7, either.

Since the bug is already fixed in 18.04 (and newer? I didn't check 19.xx), it looks to me we can leave it as is for 16.04 and 14.04, and mark the bug as WON'T FIX, if there is nothing we can really do for 16.04 and 14.04.

Dexuan,

To be clear, while there is no further point-release to be published for 16.04, we can still fix the bug. The patch will be available to users updating their systems normally while 16.04 is supported, so daily images may receive the fix (if this is applicable to clouds) and after an update of grub, one should no longer see the error.

Hello Dexuan, or anyone else affected,

Accepted grub2 into xenial-proposed. The package will build now and be available at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation on how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please add a comment to this bug, mentioning the version of the package you tested and change the tag from verification-needed-xenial to verification-done-xenial. If it does not fix the bug for you, please add a comment stating that, and change the tag to verification-failed-xenial. In either case, without details of your testing we will not be able to proceed.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance for helping!

N.B. The updated package will be released to -updates after the bug(s) fixed by this package have been verified and the package has been in -proposed for a minimum of 7 days.

Hi Mathieu, thank you for the explanation and pushing the fix!

Hi Brian, I'll test the new grub2 binary in a Ubuntu 16.04.6 VM on Hyper-V.

It looks the .22 binary (2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22) for amd64 has not appeared in the -proposed repo yet.

I can not find it in https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/+package/grub-common and http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/xenial-proposed/main/uefi/grub2-amd64/ (please let me know if I'm looking at the wrong place)

I added
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-proposed restricted main multiverse universe
into /etc/apt/sources.list and ran "apt-get update", and when I tried to upgrade to the .22 version, it can not be found:

root@decui-g2-1604:~# apt-get install grub2-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
grub2-common is already the newest version (2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.21).
grub2-common set to manually installed.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 70 not upgraded.

root@decui-g2-1604:~# apt-get install grub2-common=2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Version '2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22' for 'grub2-common' was not found

Hello Dexuan, or anyone else affected,

Accepted grub2-signed into xenial-proposed. The package will build now and be available at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2-signed/1.66.22 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation on how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please add a comment to this bug, mentioning the version of the package you tested and change the tag from verification-needed-xenial to verification-done-xenial. If it does not fix the bug for you, please add a comment stating that, and change the tag to verification-failed-xenial. In either case, without details of your testing we will not be able to proceed.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance for helping!

N.B. The updated package will be released to -updates after the bug(s) fixed by this package have been verified and the package has been in -proposed for a minimum of 7 days.

Hi Brian, "apt-get update; apt-get install grub2-common" still reports "grub2-common is already the newest version (2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.21)" to me, and the new version can not be found.

I'm running the Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS (4.4.0-142-generic #168-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jan 16 21:00:45 UTC 2019 x86_64) version and I have "deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-proposed restricted main multiverse universe" in my /etc/apt/sources.list. I guess I must be missing something?

Hi Dexuan,

You might want to try this again. There were some delays in completely processing all the required files for this SRU, which may have translated in it not being available when you tried.

Judging from deploying a VM here with bionic-proposed enabled, it should be available now:

ubuntu@civil-eft:~$ apt policy grub2-common
grub2-common:
  Installed: 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22
  Candidate: 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22
  Version table:
 *** 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22 100
         -1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-proposed/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.21 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main amd64 Packages
     2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages

Hi Mathieu,
Thanks for the hint! After I changed the Pin-Priority from 400 to 600 in the below file, I successfully installed the *3.22 version:

root@decui-g2-1604:~# cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/proposed-updates
Package: *
Pin: release a=xenial-proposed
Pin-Priority: 600

...

root@decui-g2-1604:~# apt policy grub2-common
grub2-common:
  Installed: 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22
  Candidate: 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22
  Version table:
 *** 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22 600
        600 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-proposed/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.21 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main amd64 Packages
     2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages

And I can confirm the issue is fixed for "16.04.6 LTS (Xenial Xerus)"!

Now in the VM running on Hyper-V, I get the below as expected (previously I can not see the line with the *3.21 version of grub2):

root@decui-g2-1604:~# dmesg | grep "efifb: framebuffer"
[ 0.472000] efifb: framebuffer at 0xf8000000, mapped to 0xffffc90001c00000, using 3072k, total 3072k

Thank you all for the quick response!

Thanks! Marking verification-done-xenial since it's been confirmed to fix the issue.

This bug was fixed in the package grub2 - 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22

---------------
grub2 (2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22) xenial; urgency=medium

  * debian/patches/skip_text_gfxpayload_where_not_supported.patch: Skip the
    'text' payload if it's not supported but present in gfxpayload, such as
    on EFI systems. (LP: #1826453)

 -- Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <email address hidden> Mon, 29 Apr 2019 10:04:24 -0400

The verification of the Stable Release Update for grub2 has completed successfully and the package has now been released to -updates. Subsequently, the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team is being unsubscribed and will not receive messages about this bug report. In the event that you encounter a regression using the package from -updates please report a new bug using ubuntu-bug and tag the bug report regression-update so we can easily find any regressions.

This bug was fixed in the package grub2-signed - 1.66.22

---------------
grub2-signed (1.66.22) xenial; urgency=medium

  * Rebuild against grub2 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.22. (LP: #1826453)

 -- Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <email address hidden> Tue, 30 Apr 2019 11:16:33 -0400