[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#731477: sysvinit: Hangs when booted into "-b" (emergency) mode

[Jeffrey Sheinberg]

Package: sysvinit
Version: 2.88dsf-41+deb7u1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I regularly boot into "-b" (emergency) at least once a week, in order to
perform backups of my root partition while it is in a read-only state.

I have never experienced any problems with using "-b" (emergency) mode
before encountering this problem.

This problem has so far only happened when booting this linux kernel,

    linux-image-3.11-0.bpo.2-amd64

and only when booting it into "-b" (emergency) mode.  I can boot this
same linux kernel into "-s" (single user) mode, or into normal (runlevel
2) mode without any problems.

I currently also have these linux kernels installed,

    linux-image-3.10-0.bpo.3-amd64
    linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64

and can boot either of them into "-b" (emergency) mode without any
problems.

The problematic scenario is as follows,

    1. Select custom grub stanza with "-b" option on kernel command line.

    2. Grub loads kernel and its corresponding initrd, and boots that kernel.

    3. The normal linux kernel boot messages are written to the screen.

    4. The normal initrd loading "top" and "bottom" script messages are
    written to the screen.

    5. The normal "INIT 2.88 booting" message is written to the screen.

    6. The normal emergency mode boot prompt (enter Control-d to
    continue) is written to the screen.

    7. At this point I enter the root password, but instead of starting a
    root shell, the system is hung.  There is no response to the magic
    "Alt-SysReq" key, also no response to "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" either.

    8. I have to toggle the UPS power switch in order to reboot into the BIOS.

I repeated the above problematic scenario a few times, and I noticed a
strange occurrance at "step 7." - While I was typing the root password
the numlock led on the keyboard was flickering at a low intensity
whenever a character of the root password was entered.

Thanks,
Jeffrey Sheinberg

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.2
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.11-0.bpo.2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages sysvinit depends on:
ii  debianutils     4.3.2
ii  initscripts     2.88dsf-41+deb7u1
ii  libc6           2.13-38
ii  libselinux1     2.1.9-5
ii  libsepol1       2.1.4-3
ii  sysv-rc         2.88dsf-41+deb7u1
ii  sysvinit-utils  2.88dsf-41+deb7u1

sysvinit recommends no packages.

sysvinit suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information