Bug#766233: VM won't start after an automatic upgrade to systemd inside the VM

[Tomas Pospisek]

Hoi Daniel,

On Tue, 21 Oct 2014, Daniel Baumann wrote:

> On 10/21/2014 07:07 PM, Tomas Pospisek wrote:
>> I've upgraded a jessie lxc VM. The jessie lxc VM was running on a wheezy
>> host.
>
> unfortunately, lxc in wheezy lacks support for different things, running
> a system with systemd in it is not supported. from my point of view,
> there's nothing that can be reasonably done about it here in lxc.
>
> i'm downgrading the bug to its proper severity, and versioned-close it
> appropriatly (it will stay open for wheezy, but not for jessie).

If the problem is left as is for the soon coming wheezy -> jessie upgrade, 
then a slow "Debian LXC VMs Blackout" wave might come rolling past us and 
the internet soon (maybe it's allready imperceptibly swelling).

Here are a few ideas what could be done about this problem:

1) document it in jessie's Release Notes. I'd say anybody upgrading a VM
    should read the release notes, however there's no such policy in
    Debian, so we can not really *expect* the user to read them before
    upgrading...

2) release an updated lxc package for wheezy, that warns the user about
    the problem.

3) do something in the systemd packages to work around the problem.

4) do something during the upgrade of the sysinit packages that would
    detect that it's running in LXC and about to upgrade to systemd and
    warn the user ("please dear user, stop the upgrade now and please do a
    'apt-get install sysvinit-core systemd-shim' first") or force the user
    to install a "lxc-guest" package that does the right thing.

There might well be other options. What do you think?
*t