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

[Jeffrey Sheinberg]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 10:51:17PM -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> 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.

Henrique,

This problem initially manifested after the new

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

kernel was installed, and its corresponding initrd was created by

    "initramfs-tools-0.113~bpo70+1"

However, after I installed

    "initramfs-tools-0.115"

and then deleted and (re)created the initrd, and tested by rebooting
into "-b" (emergency) mode, then problem was fixed!

Thanks so much for your suggestions,

-- 
Jeffrey Sheinberg