Bug#931267: times out and drops into useless emergency shell with fsck still ongoing
Steve McIntyre
steve at einval.com
Sun Jun 30 00:46:46 BST 2019
Package: systemd
Version: 241-5
Severity: important
Hi,
[ Ignore the system info etc. below - I'm running reportbug on a
different system. ]
I've just dist-upgraded my headless home firewall/server from Stretch
to Buster. I did the usual task of config file merging. and then
rebooted the machine. It didn't come up on the network again
afterwards.
After rummaging around to connect a serial cable, there was no
interaction on the console so I rebooted again. Now I see that the
machine is running a fsck on the multiple large filesystems (Debian
mirror, video/audio data etc.) Fine - the machine had not been
rebooted in a long time, so the fsck was overdue. Then I see that
systemd has decided to time out startup of services and drop me into
an Emergency shell. With fsck going on and writing to the console, I
cannot useful interact with the shell. The fsck completed
successfully, but I had a headless machine that still needed
interaction to make it work again.
Several points/questions:
* Why on earth do things have a short timeout when fsck is still
running? It's normal for fsck on a large fs to take a long time,
and this should not break bootup. Especially not on a headless box.
* Why does systemd try to start an Emergency shell on an already-busy
console? This is *not* useful.
* I haven't tried to reproduce this, but the initial interaction on
the console seemed to show a hung machine. I had no useful
interaction there. Is the Emergency shell setup meant to prompt
again on password failure if I just hit <enter> several times?
-- Package-specific info:
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.0
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-5-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages systemd depends on:
ii adduser 3.118
ii libacl1 2.2.53-4
ii libapparmor1 2.13.2-10
ii libaudit1 1:2.8.4-3
ii libblkid1 2.33.1-0.1
ii libc6 2.28-10
ii libcap2 1:2.25-2
ii libcryptsetup12 2:2.1.0-5
ii libgcrypt20 1.8.4-5
ii libgnutls30 3.6.7-4
ii libgpg-error0 1.35-1
ii libidn11 1.33-2.2
ii libip4tc0 1.8.2-4
ii libkmod2 26-1
ii liblz4-1 1.8.3-1
ii liblzma5 5.2.4-1
ii libmount1 2.33.1-0.1
ii libpam0g 1.3.1-5
ii libseccomp2 2.3.3-4
ii libselinux1 2.8-1+b1
ii libsystemd0 241-5
ii mount 2.33.1-0.1
ii util-linux 2.33.1-0.1
Versions of packages systemd recommends:
ii dbus 1.12.16-1
ii libpam-systemd 241-5
Versions of packages systemd suggests:
ii policykit-1 0.105-25
ii systemd-container 241-5
Versions of packages systemd is related to:
pn dracut <none>
ii initramfs-tools 0.133
ii udev 241-5
-- Configuration Files:
/etc/systemd/logind.conf changed [not included]
-- no debconf information
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