Dear Maintainer,

I use Debian with Orca and BRLTTY and executed grub-emu.
When ran on mate-terminal, it shows an interface where BRLTTY displays "Screen not in text mode" and Orca doesn't speak at all.
The only solution to stop it is to killall -9 grub-emu from another terminal.

The most critical situation is when I run grub-emu from a TTY session. In this case, BRLTTY displays again "Screen not in text mode" and my system locked, I was not able to close grub-emu nor to use another TTY to kill it.
The only solution I found to reboot correctly was use SSH.

I can reproduce the problem only by running grub-emu as root.  It is
reproducible in both the 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 (Buster) and 2.04-8
(current Bullseye).

The severity is not an exaggeration IMO as afterwards your machine
will be headless.  Recovering with Alt+SysRq+k does not work; neither
does restarting the X server.  I had to restart the machine every time
I ran grub-emu as root.  If logging in remotely is not an option,
pressing "Alt+SysRq+r" and then "Ctrl+Alt+Del" at least 8 times in
quick succession should make systemd reboot the machine cleanly as
long as this feature was not disabled.

For debugging purposes I added this as the first entry in grub.cfg:

  menuentry 'halt' {
          set timeout=5
          halt
  }

In non-SDL-mode it makes "grub-emu" exit normally even without
pressing any keys.

I see at least two problems at play:

 * grub-emu in SDL mode does not react in any way to key presses
   after starting

 * grub-emu in SDL mode does not restore the previous video mode even
   after exiting normally using the above grub.cfg snippet.

I think only these options are realistic:

* have upstream fix the bug
* compile with --disable-grub-emu-sdl
* stop shipping grub-emu altogether

Unless someone stops me I'll file a bug in the upstream tracker for
this 14 days from now.

Regards,
Dennis.

Hello everyone,
tried if I can reproduce this issue here and found it
shows up with a qemu VM without giving any vga device options.

I got following list where I could find the issue:

grub-emu (2.06-3~deb10u4, buster)       broken
grub-emu (2.06-3~deb11u6, bullseye)     broken
grub-emu (2.06-13+deb12u1, bookworm)    broken
grub-emu (2.12-8, trixie/testing)       working

In Trixie I could leave the application by 'c'onsole and 'halt'.
Maybe the change from sdl1 to sdl2 changed some internals in grub-emu.
Before it seems grub-emu did not even respond to any keyboard input.

Therefore is this bug still an issue?
As it looks like grub-emu no longer uses framebuffer,
does it work now with orca/brltty?

Kind regards,
Bernhard

Version: 2.12-8


I'm going to assume that this shows the issue is fixed and close the bug
with this version set, such that it still shows up for the broken releases.

Paul