[pkg-cryptsetup-devel] Bug#768314: Bug#768314: cryptsetup: Passphrase prompt rolls by without stopping

[Jonas Meurer]

Hi Kjetil,

after discussing this issue with other fellow debian developers,
i might have a better understanding of what's going on. to be
honest, i don't have much experience with systemd myself yet.

Am 2014-12-15 12:07, schrieb Kjetil Kjernsmo:
> On Monday 15. December 2014 07.34.07 Jonas Meurer wrote:
>> Which init system do you use? Is this systemd, sysvinit or something
>> completely different?
> 
> I think it is systemd (no conscious decision from my side):
> kjetil at owl:~$ ls -l /sbin/init
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Nov 28 06:55 /sbin/init ->
> /lib/systemd/systemd

as written earlier, systemd has it's own cryptsetup agent and
uses that one to unlock encrypted devices instead of the the
cryptdisks initscripts used by sysvinit.

the problem is, that systemd doesn't wait for optional user
input after running cryptsetup. the boot logger plymouth is
responsible for this task.

could you try to install plymouth on your system and see whether
that fixes your issues? you can configure plymouth to use a
text-mode theme if you don't like the graphical boot splash
screen that hides all the boot log messages.

if missing plymouth is the reason for the issues you discovered,
then i fear that there's no easy solution to fix this bug. it seems
like systemd simply requires something like plymouth to properly
display user prompts at boot time :-/

> Anyway, there's something that I suppose could be related, since /usr
> is currently mounted just after /home:
> 
> [ 20.600434] systemd[1]: /usr appears to be on its own filesytem and
> is not already mounted. This is not a supported setup. Some things
> will probably break (sometimes even silently) in mysterious ways.
> Consult
> http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken
> for more information.
> 
> [ 20.689337] systemd[1]: Cannot add dependency job for unit
> display-manager.service, ignoring: Unit display-manager.service failed
> to load: No such file or directory.
> 
> So, my idea was that /usr didn't need to be encrypted, and since it
> can also be mounted ro, I figured it could be a good idea to make a
> separate partition for it. But that seems to have been a Bad Idea,
> perhaps cryptsetup needs something in /usr that isn't there when /home
> is mounted?

that's a separate issue. seems like systemd indeed doesn't support
separate /usr partitions. that has been fixed in initramfs recently
by mounting /usr in initramfs, but it's not clear yet whether that
one makes it into jessie in time. still, the issue with separate
/usr partition seems to be unrelated. if you're lucky, then
installing plymouth will simply fix your boot process for the
moment.

cheers,
  jonas