Oracle Linux & server showed blank screen instead of GDM login screen & switching to text-based console login screen showes: "start job is running for Wait for Plymouth boot screen to quit" (Doc ID 2433775.1)

Last updated on AUGUST 14, 2018

Applies to:

Symptoms

An Oracle Linux 7 server was patched, and post reboot, instead of showing the GDM (Gnome Display Manager) login screen, the screen was blank.

Switching to  a text-based virtual console via "Alt +F1" , shows the following error:

"start job is running for Wait for Plymouth boot screen to quit"

Logging in via runlevel 3 is successful however login fails when in runlevel 5 and attempting to login via GDM.

This also caused core services to also fail to start, such as the systemd-readahead-replay.service and other services dependent on it (as shown in the example below) due to the services being configured to require the server to be in runlevel 5:

[root@server ~]# systemctl show -p "Wants" runlevel5.target
Wants=systemd-readahead-replay.service systemd-update-utmp-runlevel.service network.service xrdp.service accounts-daemon.service rtkit-daemon.service gdm.serv
[root@server ~]#
[root@server ~]# systemctl status systemd-readahead-replay.service
● systemd-readahead-replay.service - Replay Read-Ahead Data
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-readahead-replay.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead)
Docs: man:systemd-readahead-replay.service(8)
[root@irl-server ~]#

Cause