LXC breakage and workarounds when upgrading VMs to jessie

Tomas Pospisek tpo_deb at sourcepole.ch
Sun Nov 23 23:19:57 GMT 2014


Package: release-notes
Severity: important
Tags: patch

Dear release-notes maintainers,

LXC VMs become unbootable when upgraded to jessie.

The upgrade migrates systems automatically to systemd, after which the
VMs won't be able to boot.

The simplest workaround currently is to upgrade and then, before
rebooting, to switch back to sysv.

I'm trying to collect information about this problem and possible
work-arounds in the wiki [1], and will try to extract and refine a
proposed text for the release-notes.

My first proposed text for the release-notes is below. Please let me
know if you prefer me to submit a proper patch against a SVN checkout of
ddp.

In chapter "4.5.7. Special care for specific packages" I propose to
introduce a new subchapter "4.5.7.2. LXC" with the following text:

********************************************************************
  The upgrade from wheezy to jessie will switch the init system to
  systemd. Currently LXC VMs running systemd inside are not able to
  boot.
 
  The workaround is to proceed with the upgrade, but *before* a
  reboot of the VM, switch back to the original init system.
 
  You can determine your current init system with the following
  command:
 
      # dpkg -S /sbin/init | sed 's/:.*//'
 
  If you are running with the default sysvinit init system, then
  switch back to your original init system with:
 
      # apt-get install sysvinit-core systemd-shim

  This will reinstall the sysvinit init system and deinstall systemd.

  You can find further information on LXC in Debian
  [[https://wiki.debian.org/LXC|in the Debian wiki]].

********************************************************************

Thanks,
*t

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/LXC

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.7
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16-0.bpo.2-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_CH.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_CH.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash



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