Bug#931267: times out and drops into useless emergency shell with fsck still ongoing

[Steve McIntyre]

Control: severity -1 normal

Hey Michael,

Agreed on the downgrade...

On Mon, Jul 01, 2019 at 02:14:26PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
>
>with your additional information about the faulty fstab entry,
>I had another look.
>a/
>I first tried with a non-existing device. I also made sure the
>concurrently running fsck takes longer then 90s.
>
>The result is:
>https://people.debian.org/~biebl/bug931267/boot-missing-device.mp4
>
>systemd will indeed start the emergency shell after 90s, although the
>fsckd process is still ongoing and clobbers the output of the login prompt.
>
>Once the fsck is done, simply hitting enter one can log in without problems.
>
>b/
>Next I tried with a faulty mount point where the device exists but the
>mount options are non-sense, so will trigger a mount failure.
>The emergency shell is immediately started while fsck is still ongoing.
>See
>https://people.debian.org/~biebl/bug931267/boot-failing-mount.mp4
>
>I guess this is basically what happened in your case.
>The login prompt was again still usable.
>
>Given this, I'm inclined to downgrade the severity.
>
>I'm not entirely sure how to fix this though.
>Should systemd delay the start of the sulogin prompt until all fsck
>processes have finished? You can't interact with the system for a
>potentially very long time (the same way basically as is the case now).
>The only thing you'd gain is that the login prompt in such a case
>doesn't look clobbered.

Right. Starting things on a busy console like now is confusing for
users. I'm not sure there *is* a good answer here, tbh. :-/

Maybe(?) it would be possible to steal a few more characters of each
line of the terminal output at boot for a tiny status message? The you
could have that show that the boot has hit errors? Similar to the
existing LSB-style [ OK ] or [FAILED] messages for each servive, but
to show overall system status?

My own system looked a lot messier than what you're showing in your
simple video, of course - other services starting up around this added
a lot of noise. My server runs lots of services. Of course, I didn't
get to capture the output directly, just the logs.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
"I used to be the first kid on the block wanting a cranial implant,
 now I want to be the first with a cranial firewall. " -- Charlie Stross