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"Display output is not active" when showing Fedora boot splash screen
Describe the issue
Between the bios screen and the Xorg screen, Fedora initializes the display to full resolution, and displays a splash screen, with a spinner. Under UTM with a Fedora guest OS, when this screen is supposed to be displayed, only "Display output is not active" is shown in a low-res font.
This is a bigger problem while installing OS major version updates, because the "Display output is not active" screen may be displayed for several minutes while the system updates after a reboot, and you can't see that it's making progress.
Configuration
- UTM Version: 4.6.4
- macOS Version: 15.2
- Mac Chip (Intel, M1, ...): M4
This is an even bigger problem when you are installing the OS. You will not have the ability to choose options or see progress for automated installs. As indicated above, I get around this problem by having a serial port to the VM. I will add either 'built-in terminal' or 'ptty device' (which I'll see via screen) and see the logs/choose the options, all while there is another screen which says "Display output is not active". Once the installation is complete, the "Display output is not active" will disappear and we get to see the VM screen. NOTE: This is not specific to fedora, I have observed this in most VMs (with Display) we built for UTM VM Gallery https://naveenrajm7.github.io/utm-gallery/
Seeing the same problem here with Fedora 42. I saw it with Fedora 41 and earlier as well, to be honest, but not as frequently as I'm seeing it now.
For me, I know my OS is all set up and I have a safety copy/clone, so the best I can seem to do at this point is ssh in and force a reboot. At some point "it works" and GNOME Desktop appears.
When I add a Serial device and examine the boot process, I don't see any failures or anything unusual. Final step is gdm.service being started, followed by the login prompt sooooo... hmm.
Well now that's interesting (the core-dump failure result, specifically):
$ systemctl status gdm.service
● gdm.service - GNOME Display Manager
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/gdm.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
. . .
Active: active (running) since Wed 2025-05-21 16:11:20 EDT; 4s ago
. . .
May 21 16:11:20 fedora systemd[1]: gdm.service: Failed with result 'core-dump'.
May 21 16:11:20 fedora systemd[1]: gdm.service: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies.
May 21 16:11:20 fedora systemd[1]: gdm.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 10.
May 21 16:11:20 fedora systemd[1]: Starting gdm.service - GNOME Display Manager...
May 21 16:11:20 fedora systemd[1]: Started gdm.service - GNOME Display Manager.
But now I think this is past the point of "Display output is not active" because that message is gone, yet I still have a blank VM display. Sometimes a reboot resolves this, but it's unclear as to why.
X-Ref issue #5555 which had an interesting resolution: In System Settings > Privacy & Security, add the UTM app to the Accessibility and Screen & System Audio Recording allow lists. It remains unclear if this actually helped me but I was eventually able to boot with both networking and GNOME Desktop visible.
(FWIW, I have a comparable issue with networking, in that sometimes the networking isn't available, and I have to reboot the VM once or twice for it to appear. Perhaps there's some timeout issue elsewhere that's instigating this idk.)
Once disk encryption is enabled in the Fedora installer, the only way to enter the disk's LUKS password is through the serial console, which makes the whole process even more difficult.
Here is my experience. I've added Serial device and allowed UTM to privacy settings mentioned above. Then I started Fedora 42 KDE from live CD, After I selected boot option it was showing again Display output is not active. In serial output everything was ok and after a while, mac asked me for mic permissions to UTM, I clicked yes and display appeared. (not sure whether this last permission is relevant though):
