Plymouth renders non-ASCII as mojibake

Ask Fedora
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1

With splash and quiet removed from GRUB2’s GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, Plymouth renders the non-ASCII within [ 1.390045] usb 9-2: SerialNumber: ㉕捤稰眷㕳愳㤷湲 as mojibake. How can I ascertain what the cause is? (Font?) [1]

I don’t believe that I can provide evidence of this, without a capture card, because /var/log/boot.log and /var/log/boot.log-20260412 don’t include the relevant log.

  1. ↩︎
2

My guess is that it’s text for the serial number of the usb device.
I have seen none unicode in usb device fields.

See if you can find that text in lsusb -v output.

3

I’m no expert, but it seems like fonts in the “standard” console are limited to 512 glyphs. So even a “Unicode-aware” console font isn’t going to be able to usefully render CJK characters.

However, things will hopefully improve when Fedora 45 brings KMSCON, which appear to handle internationalisation better, including CJK characters.

4

@barryascott, it appears there, albeit as the correct UTF sequence:

RokeJulianLockhart@Beedell:~$ sudo lsusb -v | grep 眷
  iSerial                 3 ㉕捤稰眷㕳愳㤷湲
cannot read device status, Resource temporarily unavailable (11)

@pg-tips, I’d completely forgotten FBCon and KMSCon. When I can ascertain where to find a verbatim output log for FBCon, I’ll retain it, to compare against one from KMSCon. [1]

  1. wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=KMSCON&oldid=870768#Features ↩︎

5

The bytes will be the same, its the rendering into pixels that creates the mojibake.
So I’d be surprised if a log will help here.

6

Similarly, the installation ISO, in its default state, fails to render a significant quantity of characters upon shut down:

1282×868 207 KB

Is that an example of this?

7

I see this sometimes on shutdown on one of my systems.

The rectangle is the sign of a font that is missing the glyph that is required to be rendered.

Mokebake is far more creative mess…

8

So, this is a different problem? If so, I’ll create a separate thread about it.

9

I also see box characters like you when shutting down F45+ KDE Plasma Live.
Not sure why these boxes are appearing. Workstation and F44 are fine.
So it seems a KDE edition regression, but I can’t really imagine the cause,
unless there is some locale mismatch??

But yeah it seems different to your original topic here.

10

The boxes are used when a font is missing glyphs.

11

@barryascott, that is sensical. Consequently, does anyone know how to diagnose which glyphs are unaccounted for, and/or which font is erroneously absent, etcetera?

@admins, please split ≥ /6 into a new thread.

12

The text should be the same as you get when running sudo cat /var/log/boot.log.

13

boot.log doesn’t seem to include shutdown messages for me.

However not sure i can reproduce in my Rawhide vm…

14

Have a look at the system journal for the shutdown messages.
Are the ones you are looking for there?
Maybe the messages are displayed after the disk is umounted, which would prevent writing the logs to disk?

15

I miss that you were talking about shutdown messages and even a Live system. Then there is nothing saved to look at. What is strange is that the text would have been service names which are pure 7bin USASCII characters, and we see no problem seeing other USASCII characters.