Hi all,

During boot, characters with accents are being displayed between the boot messages.
Screenshots (sorry for the quality, had to record in slow-motion and then step through the video as messages are passing by very quickly):


(some chars blacked-out as it is unclear if they contain some kind of info. The chars do not appear in the logs)

Anyone an idea what is causing this?
Perhaps a systemd service that is outputting them?

System:
uname -a: Linux <hostname> 5.18.11-200.fc36.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Jul 12 22:52:35 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
echo $LANG: en_GB.UTF-8
cat /etc/redhat-release: Fedora release 36 (Thirty Six)

Greetings,
moon300

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Personally I'd ignore this unless it bugs you.

Unicode character sets have provision for accents. I programmed some for myself on my keyboard. Só Î çàn ḋô° funny accents too. The problem has probably got to do with boot loader font settings, but I don't know if you want to go there. I wouldn't.

Just wondering why the characters are printed. Usually most boot messages make some sort of sense =]. I've never seen them before during boots on Fedora 34.
What boot loader settings would cause this?

Thanks for your reply,
moon300

I'm glad that is your biggest linux problem. When you have struggled with major issues, things like wrong characters on bootup aren't worth messing with.

Are these messages garbled the same way at every boot? If yes, try defining explicit fonts and font mappings in /etc/vconsole.conf

Yes, always the same characters.
Instead of defining the font in /etc/vconsole.conf I added kernel option to set the font:
/etc/defaults/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=".... vconsole.font=default8x16 ..."
(grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg)

The garbled text is gone - see screenshot below.
(it's back exactly the same when removing the option or setting vconsole.font=eurlatgr)
So in principle problem solved. However this makes me even more curious.

Perhaps some processes that are started spit out characters that are not printed with font=default8x16, but are printed with eurlatgr?
Because the default font: eurlatgr can show more chars than default8x16?
Is there any way to determine which process(es) would spit out the garbled chars?

I'm suspecting the entries which have "?" in their output when font=default8x16, like:
Starting systemd-sysctl.se?ce - Apply Kernel Variables
Starting systemd-tmpfiles-? Volatile Files and Directories...
[ OK ] Finished systemd-tmpfiles-?te Volatile Files and Directories.
(why are there "?"s in the output?)


Thanks for your help so far!

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