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

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Sun, 08 Dec 2013, Jeffrey Sheinberg wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 08, 2013 at 07:03:02PM +0000, Roger Leigh wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 03:18:58PM -0500, Jeffrey Sheinberg wrote:
> > > 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
> > 
> > This is an odd problem, and it's going to be tricky to track down
> > without being able to easily reproduce it.  If you notice the
> > keyboard lights flickering, this looks like it's possibly an
> > input layer issue.  If only this kernel exhibits the problem then
> > sysvinit is unlikely to be involved directly.  I would suggest
> > looking at a newer kernel e.g. 3.12 and the options the kernel
> > was compiled with.

This typically happens when something in the USB + HID stacks is missing.

Please try initramfs from unstable (or backports), it works around this kind
of limitation of the extremely modular distro kernels.  But you'll still be
hosed if it can't run long enough to start udev and modprobe a lot of
modules.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh