Excellent report. Thank you.
After a some study I think I may have worked out what is going wrong.
Here are the two boot lines extracted from the logs…
The first is the “USER mode” and the second the “ROOT mode”
If you look at the second one you will note that the kernel command line calls the vesa driver “xdriver=vesa” and also supplies ‘nomodeset’ to the kernel. The nomodeset parameter instructs the kernel to not load video drivers and use BIOS modes instead until X is loaded. This should mean that the nouveau driver is not loaded at boot
If you look further down the log you will see that at LINE 583 ‘glx’ is loaded by default.
Now the ‘glx’ driver requires a device to operate on, as you can see further down it starts to look for it (Line 610) but it isn’t present because it has not been created by udev because we stopped the driver from loading at kernel boot with the ‘nomodeset’ parameter. It looks to me like the problem is that setting the ‘glx’ module to be loaded by default is incompatible with the use of the ‘nomodeset’ parameter and as a side effect prevents booting using xdriver=vesa as the default driver for X. This means that booting in basic graphics mode is not going to work.
I’m not yet completely familiar with the graphics needs of the latest KDE Plasma but I think that it does require 3D graphics as the default and thus the ‘glx’ module so booting to a non-3d graphics mode in KDE may no longer be possible. A possible solution would be to boot to LxQt It’s something we need to look at and have some discussion.
Thanks again for your efforts.
Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-desktop-1omv root=UUID=b87da8f3-cad2-4e04-8095-c2dce4fa42b4 ro quiet splash resume=UUID=702f9b2f-162a-40c2-a3c1-b0bf6015db46 rw logo.nologo acpi_osi=Linux “acpi_osi=!Windows 2012” acpi_backlight=vendor audit=0 rd.timeout=120
Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-desktop-1omv root=UUID=b87da8f3-cad2-4e04-8095-c2dce4fa42b4 ro single failsafe nomodeset xdriver=vesa vga=788 acpi_osi=Linux “acpi_osi=!Windows 2012” acpi_backlight=vendor systemd.log_level=debug systemd.log_target=kmsg log_buf_len=1M audit=0 rd.timeout=120