[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#792398: hald fails to start

[Karsten Sperling]

Package: hal
Version: 0.5.14-8
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

After upgrading from wheezy to jessie, hald fails to start from systemd,
and also when trying to run it manually for debugging purposes.

The problem seems to be caused by hald running "/sbin/udevadm info -r",
which causes udevadm to output a usage message and fail with exit code 2.
On wheezy the same command prints "/dev" and completes without error (on a
different machine).

~# systemctl status hal
hal.service - Hardware Abstraction Layer
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/hal.service; enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: timeout) since Tue 2015-07-14 23:45:51 NZST; 36min ago
  Process: 16055 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/hald --daemon=no --use-syslog (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 16055 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Jul 14 23:44:21 legend hald[16055]: -e,--export-db              export the content of the udev database
Jul 14 23:44:21 legend hald[16055]: -c,--cleanup-db             cleanup the udev database
Jul 14 23:44:21 legend hald[16055]: --version                print version of the program
Jul 14 23:44:21 legend hald[16055]: -h,--help                   print this message
Jul 14 23:44:21 legend hald[16055]: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure
Jul 14 23:44:21 legend hald[16055]: Cannot open /media/.hal-mtab
Jul 14 23:44:21 legend hald[16055]: in hal-storage-cleanup-all-mountpoints
Jul 14 23:45:51 legend systemd[1]: hal.service start operation timed out. Terminating.
Jul 14 23:45:51 legend systemd[1]: Failed to start Hardware Abstraction Layer.
Jul 14 23:45:51 legend systemd[1]: Unit hal.service entered failed state.


~# /usr/sbin/hald --daemon=no --use-syslog --verbose=yes
Runner started - allowed paths are '/usr/lib/hal:/usr/lib/hal/scripts:/usr/bin'
Usage: udevadm info [OPTIONS] [DEVPATH|FILE]
 -q,--query=TYPE             query device information:
      name                     name of device node
      symlink                  pointing to node
      path                     sys device path
      property                 the device properties
      all                      all values
 -p,--path=SYSPATH           sys device path used for query or attribute walk
 -n,--name=NAME              node or symlink name used for query or attribute walk
 -r,--root                   prepend dev directory to path names
 -a,--attribute-walk         print all key matches walking along the chain
                             of parent devices
 -d,--device-id-of-file=FILE print major:minor of device containing this file
 -x,--export                 export key/value pairs
 -P,--export-prefix          export the key name with a prefix
 -e,--export-db              export the content of the udev database
 -c,--cleanup-db             cleanup the udev database
    --version                print version of the program
 -h,--help                   print this message

Run started hal-storage-cleanup-all-mountpoints (20000) (0) 
!  full path is '/usr/lib/hal/hal-storage-cleanup-all-mountpoints', program_dir is '/usr/lib/hal'
in hal-storage-cleanup-all-mountpoints
org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure
Cannot open /media/.hal-mtab
pid 16709: rc=1 signaled=0: /usr/lib/hal/hal-storage-cleanup-all-mountpoints
Run started hald-addon-cpufreq (0) (0) 
!  full path is '/usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-cpufreq', program_dir is '/usr/lib/hal'
Run started hald-addon-acpi (0) (0) 
!  full path is '/usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-acpi', program_dir is '/usr/lib/hal'


Relevant line from strace -f:
16494 execve("/sbin/udevadm", ["/sbin/udevadm", "info", "-r"], [/* 21 vars */]) = 0
16494 write(2, "Usage: udevadm info [OPTIONS] [D"..., 1113) = 1113


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.1
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_NZ.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages hal depends on:
ii  adduser           3.113+nmu3
ii  dbus              1.8.18-0+deb8u1
ii  hal-info          20091130-1
ii  libblkid1         2.25.2-6
ii  libc6             2.19-18
ii  libdbus-1-3       1.8.18-0+deb8u1
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2  0.102-1
ii  libexpat1         2.1.0-6+b3
ii  libglib2.0-0      2.42.1-1
ii  libhal-storage1   0.5.14-8
ii  libhal1           0.5.14-8
ii  libusb-0.1-4      2:0.1.12-25
ii  lsb-base          4.1+Debian13+nmu1
ii  mount             2.25.2-6
ii  pciutils          1:3.2.1-3
ii  udev              215-17+deb8u1
ii  usbutils          1:007-2

Versions of packages hal recommends:
ii  consolekit  0.4.6-5
ii  eject       2.1.5+deb1+cvs20081104-13.1
pn  pm-utils    <none>

hal suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information