Bug#768657: [Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#768657: sysvinit: Please provide xen virtual console in inittab

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2014-12-03 at 23:12 +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> I'm not sure to understand what the original bug report is about
> precisely.  AIUI, it is about the following scenario:
> 
> 1) install debian in a Xen domU, ending up with systemd installed by
> default
> 2) install sysvinit-core to switch back to sysvinit boot
> 3) end up having to fix this and that to get sysvinit work properly
> 
> I am not very surprised that it does not work.  The various tuning that
> d-i does usually only work on what gets installed during d-i, not on
> what gets installed later on.  That's particularly the case for software
> which doesn't provide nice hooks for d-i to use them.
> 
> I'm just wondering one thing: between steps 1) and 2), does the
> installed system (using systemd) properly have a login banner on hvc0?

I believe it will, systemd probes for suitable console devices and
spawns getty's for them. I'm sure I've seen this in Debian guests using
systemd, although I've not gone and checked my recollection.

> It would make sense, but I'm not sure we can manage to write something
> that both sysvinit and systemd can understand easily. "include" support
> could be added to sysvinit, and /etc/inittab made to include the
> d-i-generate bits, but it'd still be in inittab format, which AIUI
> systemd wouldn't grok. So it would be something else, but then we would
> have to make sysvinit aware of what a serial login is, which it has
> never been made to, for flexibility reasons.

Something which might be helpful is
http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2013-12/msg00805.html which
was posted on the xen-devel but redirected to the appropriate upstream,
since it isn't Xen specific. I wonder how that got on. Anyway, it would
allow all the various initsystems to just spawn one of these "smart
gettys" and get a getty on the console device, whatever that may be.

Ian.