After Jessie upgrade: Console clears and logo disappears

Question

After upgrading to Jessie I had a lot of strange issues, which I've mostly resolved, but one thing I still can't get to the bottom of is, just after boot, the console display clears itself of all the boot log messages and then displays the login prompt at the top of the screen. After this screen-clear the Raspberry Pi logo is also gone.

I'm pretty sure this didn't happen before the upgrade.

If it's any help:

# pg /boot/cmdline.txt
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p6 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait consoleblank=0 

So, how can I prevent (a) the console screen clearing, and (b) losing the Raspberry logo?

Answer 1

Systemd does this by default. This is the new init system replacing SysV; it has been used for a number of years on Fedora and incorporated by Debian for version 8. Many people are irritated by this at first but it is a significant improvement, and Debian have made an effort to provide some backward compatibility to ease the pain.

Anyway: Go into /etc/systemd/system; there should be a getty.target.wants directory there with a symlink inside to /lib/systemd/system/getty@.service; the symlink is called getty@tty1.service. Edit this file (which requires root privileges) and look for:

TTYVTDisallocate=yes

Under [Service]; there is a comment about this there too. Change it to "no" and the console will not be cleared after boot. I think this includes the logo but I can't recall; otherwise there may not be much you can do about that.

This presumes you aren't using autologin, or a fresh jessie image, which may be configured differently.