Bug#823346: systemd[1]: system-generators terminated by signal ALRM.

[Jean-Luc Coulon (f5ibh)]

Package: systemd-cron
Severity: important

Hi,

When I boot my system with systemd installed, it "freezes" (seems to) after 7
seconds or so. This is, on my system, jsut after enumerated the USB devices.
If I left and wait, it restart it normal boot sequence at 90 seconds or so. And
everything went fine.

If I "do something", it gets out of freeze quickier. I tried to plug / unplug an
USB device (I started with the enumerated ones thinking one of them is the
culprit).

An other guy said he has the same message while he swiched from a hdd to a ssd.
I'm on a ssd by this occured very recently. The system has worked flawlessly
for several months. He said that the timeout is shorter if he creates some
entropy pressing many keys on the keyboard.

As the message is related to systemd, I've reinstalle sysvinit. And this fixed
the problem.

I've seen an upgrade of systemd on sid so I tried to reinstall systemd. I got
the same problem.

BUT: if I keep systemd but remove systemd-cron, I've not this problem.

Here is the part of the boot log where the problem appears:
[ 7.405270] usb 1-6: new high-speed USB device number 4 using xhci_hcd
[ 7.578858] usb 1-6: New USB device found, idVendor=0424, idProduct=2514
[ 7.579007] usb 1-6: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0
[ 7.579746] hub 1-6:1.0: USB hub found
[ 7.579939] hub 1-6:1.0: 2 ports detected
[ 7.858529] usb 1-6.1: new full-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd
[ 7.957340] usb 1-6.1: New USB device found, idVendor=045e, idProduct=0745
[ 7.957489] usb 1-6.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber
=0
[ 7.957661] usb 1-6.1: Product: Microsoft® 2.4GHz Transceiver v6.0
[ 7.957801] usb 1-6.1: Manufacturer: Microsoft
[ 93.198778] systemd[1]: system-generators terminated by signal ALRM.
[ 93.274495] systemd[1]: Listening on Journal Audit Socket.
[ 93.275318] systemd[1]: Started Dispatch Password Requests to Console Directory
Watch.
[ 93.276091] systemd[1]: Listening on Device-mapper event daemon FIFOs.
[ 93.276835] systemd[1]: Listening on udev Control Socket.


The USB devices are a EATON UPS and my keyboard/mouse.
I tried to unplug them before the boot and I get the same problem.
If I unplug one of them while if "freeze" state, the boot process resumes.
If I plug anything (usb disk, usb key), it resumes also.

So for the moment, I've the system running with systemd, systemd-cron is
uninstalled and I've cron/anacron instead.

Regards

Jean-Luc





-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.6.0-rc5-i7-1.1 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)