LUKS disk encryption and Nvidia drivers

Sometimes the combination of two apparently unrelated components can turn out to have surprising results.

In this case I had just re-installed Ubuntu on my laptop together with full disk encryption and everything was fine.

However, after upgrading to the latest proprietary Nvidia drivers (378.13) and restarting, I was not able to enter the disk encryption password anymore - the splash screen appeared frozen:

Entering the password ‘blindly’ and pressing enter did not work either.

Workaround

Luckily, the next time you reboot, it is possible to select recovery mode from Grub menu, which asks for the encryption password in a text-only (and functioning) prompt.

After entering the password, selecting ‘resume normal boot’ from the recovery menu will take you to the login screen, like nothing ever happened..until next time.

A Slightly better workaround

Since doing that every time is slightly annoying and time-consuming, it is more convenient to update /etc/default/grub and remove “splash” from the following line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

After that, for the changes to take effect:

$ sudo update-grub

and the next boot you should be greeted by a text prompt right away.

Not great, but works.

Turns out it is not a new bug at all, but still around.

Written on March 16, 2017