Comment 8 for bug 559761

> possible duplicate of 554079 ?

This bug is similar to (at least) 554079, 554737 and 557161. However, there are differences in each case:

In bug #554079, it appears that plymouth is stalling during fsck, which results in GDM not loading. 554079 also makes no mention of the "mountall: Plymouth command failed" error message. In my case KDM loads properly and fsck appears to operate correctly.

In bug #554737, the mountall process appears to be blocked by a plymouthd process, and vice versa. In my case, there are no plymouth processes running after boot.

In bug #557161, the mountall process terminates shortly after KDM loads. In my case, the mountall process continues running for several minutes.

Some additional details:

If fsck only checks my root partition at boot time (setting a high mount count with tune2fs), mountall terminates promptly. The "mountall: Plymouth command failed" errors only appear 30 or so times before ceasing, as in bug #557161.

I can replicate the symptom of mountall failing to terminate by running fsck on only /dev/sda5 at boot. This is a 15 GiB, ext3 partition, 91% full. A fsck on this partition normally takes less than 4 minutes.
However, at boot time, mountall continues running for 17 minutes. Once the system had booted (approx. 4 minutes), no fsck processes were running, nor was there any HDD activity.
  $ ps -F -C mountall
    UID PID PPID C SZ RSS PSR STIME TTY TIME CMD
    root 356 1 82 10598 40852 0 13:42 ? 00:17:16 mountall --daemon
The mountall process terminated less than 2 seconds later.

I am also attaching a backtrace of the mountall process, as requested at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/554737/comments/22. However, unlike that bug, there were no plymouth processes running at the time ('ps -ef | grep ply' failed to find anything).