Bug#751624: emergency shell fails to start on tty1

Andrew Suffield asuffield at suffields.me.uk
Sun Aug 3 02:18:41 BST 2014


I just had this one happen to me when upgrading from wheezy to jessie,
and I've taken a close look at the timing. The pattern suggests it's a
slightly different class of bug to what's been suggested so far.

On tty1, it repeatedly prints the "Welcome to emergency mode!" message
and does nothing else.

On tty9 where I have enabled the debug shell, something interesting
happens: it repeatedly kills the shell, prints the message, and starts
a new shell.

It's pretty clear that something is trying to start the rescue shell
on the current tty and failing. The interaction with the debug shell
is quite regrettable: it kills everything on *the current tty*, not
tty1. At first I thought that this meant I could only debug the
problem using commands which could by typed in under 5 seconds, but
then inspiration struck: if I flip away from tty9 every 4 seconds, I
can have the kill land somewhere else.

I got as far as stracing the pesky thing (attached) - I can see it
runs the echo, but never runs sulogin. There was absolutely nothing in
journalctl about it. Hope all that gives you some hints about what to
look for.
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