Bug#769069: systemd: Failed to start Login Service

[Simon McVittie]

On 12/11/14 13:33, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Not quite, all it shows is that the problem is most likely in dbus and
> not systemd itself.

Based on the log you quoted, I'm not sure I agree. The problem is
certainly in the interaction between dbus and systemd, but it doesn't
look as though systemd is doing its side of that interaction by
connecting to the system dbus-daemon?

Paul, while you still have the relevant logs, could you please provide
the full journalctl output or syslog for the boot in question, or if
that's too large or too private, at least a censored version, or  the
lines for dbus.service and systemd itself?

This might help:

    journalctl -b -3 _PID=1 _PID=945

or maybe

    journalctl -b -3 SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=systemd SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=dbus

> As you can see, other D-Bus activated services fail
> as well.
...
>>         $ journalctl -b -3 -u dbus.service -u logind.service
>>         -- Logs begin at Sa 2014-09-27 16:08:57 CEST, end at Mi 2014-11-12 09:41:28 CET. --
>>         Nov 11 07:45:46 asrock-350m1 dbus[945]: [system] Activating systemd to hand-off: service name='org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1' unit='polkitd.servi
>>         Nov 11 07:45:58 asrock-350m1 dbus[945]: [system] Activating systemd to hand-off: service name='org.freedesktop.login1' unit='dbus-org.freedesk
>>         Nov 11 07:46:16 asrock-350m1 dbus[945]: [system] Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.systemd1': timed out
>>         Nov 11 07:46:16 asrock-350m1 dbus[945]: [system] Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1': timed out
>>         Nov 11 07:46:16 asrock-350m1 dbus[945]: [system] Activating systemd to hand-off: service name='org.freedesktop.Avahi' unit='dbus-org.freedeskt
>>         Nov 11 07:46:23 asrock-350m1 dbus[945]: [system] Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.login1': timed out

When running dbus-daemon --system --systemd-activation (as we do under
systemd) and a D-Bus system service is marked as having a corresponding
systemd service, dbus-daemon does not activate the service itself: it
just waits for systemd to connect to the system dbus-daemon and claim
its well-known bus name org.freedesktop.systemd1, then sends systemd a
request "hey, activate this for me please?" and waits for it to happen.

There are two possible places for this to time out: either systemd does
not connect to the dbus-daemon, or systemd does connect to dbus-daemon,
dbus-daemon sends the request, but the service is never started or never
takes its name.

In this log, it looks as though systemd has not connected to
dbus-daemon. There isn't a whole lot dbus-daemon can do about that...

    S