on my UEFI booting computer I installed an fresh Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS using LVM partition scheme some months ago.
$ lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE LABEL UUID MOUNTPOINT
sda
├─sda1 vfat 79DE-0D6B /boot/efi
└─sda2 LVM2_member ZBlrfj-ZwAJ-2T3b-gUHr-eKVw-nhIi-9bQQTs
├─ubuntu--vg-root ext4 e85edc94-cc00-42c5-8994-cbb835e8e315 /
└─ubuntu--vg-swap_1 swap e699c892-4046-4d0b-957a-f936cc4c9973 [SWAP]
The first months every boot went as expected, what means the GRUB boot menu was only shown, if the system was not shut down correctly. So the well known recordfail feature seemed to work fine.
But then, some weeks ago, after an system upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, the GRUB boot menu started to reveal itself at every boot, with a timeout of 30 seconds. Of course, in the long run this is annoying :-(
After inspecting the grub configuration file /boot/grub/grub.cfg I found out, that the recordfail feature was declared as broken regarding the usage of LVM?! The recordfail feature was disabled and therfore, GRUB keeps showing the boot menu at every boot.
set recordfail=1
# GRUB lacks write support for lvm, so recordfail support is disabled.
The source for this permanent disabled recordfail feature I found then in the further GRUB configration generating script /etc/grub.d/00_header in the check_writable() function.
abstractions="$(grub-probe --target=abstraction "${grubdir}")"
for abstraction in $abstractions; do
case "$abstraction" in
diskfilter | lvm)
cat <<EOF
# GRUB lacks write support for $abstraction, so recordfail support is disabled.
EOF
return 1
;;
esac
done
As you can read, the author declared the two modules diskfilter and lvm to brake the recordfail feature, thus resulting in the annoying 30 seconds timeout at every boot.
So far this is the status quo and all things seem to work as expected... But, why did the recordfail feature work well in the first place? Is there a unresolved bug, which is the cause for disabling it? Am I the only person on earth running this constelation of bootloader and partition scheme? I'm looking forward, that some one can solve this mystery.
Thanks in advance
/EDIT I don't want to just get rid of the annoying GRUB boot menu timeout. Instead, I want to understand where the underlaying problem, for this behavior, is.
