[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#903851: DBUS? Continuing Problems after migration to "testing"

[Thomas Hardman]

Upon advice I have migrated the machine to "testing", resetting
/etc/apt/sources.list and running `apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade`.
That process did not go without errors but `apt --fix-broken install` run
in a root terminal did complete.

My problem remains. At any time that I allow an unattended reboot, it gets
to a certain point and there is repetitive screen blanking, a brief flash
back to text mode, more screen blanking, etc. Attempts to switch to a text
console (via <ctrl-alt-F5> for example) provide no relief nor a usable
screen. Flashing continues.

Rebooting and using GRUB to go rescue mode, I can watch the progress, I get
to the "reached rescue target" and login prompts. I give root password and
from there 'service dbus start ; systemctl default' takes me right to the X
login and from there all goes well and as expected. This is all very
repeatable.

Previous attempts to debug this seemed to indicate that 'dbus' was never
started by systemd but that doesn't seem possible. Yet that's how I hit on
the simple workaround of starting D-Bus from the rescue commandline. My
clue was messages in logs to the effect that /var/run/dbus did not exist.

I have /var on a "spinner" drive along with /home and /tmp, and /  and /usr
are on two different partitions of an NVME/PCIe solid-state drive.

/etc/fstab mounts these partitions from the "spinner" drive using UUID
rather than calling (for example) /dev/sda1 to mount on /var. Possibly
irrelevant.

Is it possible that somewhere in the process of mounting the spinner
partition for /var, the dbus directory with dbus.service and dbus.socket
becomes inaccessible and need to be recreated with `service dbus restart`?

If this seems likely, please advise on how to  add a workaround to the
systemd startup process. I admit to being less than proficient in systemd,
having come from sysv init.

Regards,
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