[systemd-devel] systemd stops booting

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Kay Sievers at 17/12/11 16:07 did gyre and gimble:
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 10:41, Sipos Ferenc <sipos.ferenc at bpokft.hu> wrote:
>> I have a laptop with a dual boot and lvm setup, systemd works fine there. On
>> my desktop machine, it stops booting after starting lock (mounting all
>> partition), I can reboot with ctrl-alt-del (it complains about ck-log-
>> start.service). The desktop machine has a special disk setup:
>> ssd dmraid, with /, /boot and /home
>> raid0 hdd setup with /var and another partition mounted under /home/user
>> OS is Arch linux latest stable. Where can I find the systemd specific log
>> file, how can I see what went wrong? Using rsyslogd, and common services like
>> networkmanager, acpid, etc.
>> With initscripts, it boots fine.
>> Any help appreciated.
> 
> Dmraid and LVM setups are very distro specific, and the setup of them
> is mostly a big dirty shell script hack. The problem is unlikely
> systemd specific, it's probably just making the distro's sysv 'hack'
> work on systemd systems; the timing is very different with systemd,
> and many of the fragile things fail here which worked just fine on
> sysv.
> 
> You better check with your distro, it's unlikely something systemd
> upstream can fix or provide help for.

This might also relate to how you generate your initrd. In
Mandriva/Mageia, we used mkinitrd to do this but it has numerous
problems relating to LVM due to calling vgchange prior to udev startup
and thus "loosing" the metadata that normally goes into udev. As systemd
makes heavy use of udev metadata when dealing with mounts, it can cause
problems (normally resulting in a failure to start local-fs.service).

I can only recommend dracut as a system for generating initrds. I've
been busyily converting Mageia to use it and while there are quite a few
problems relating to mounting /usr, I've now managed to patch it[1]
sufficiently to happily mount and LVM based /usr partition quite happily
(and in case Lennart shouts at me, I've informed Harald of most of my
patches - the only ones he doesn't know about are the more recent ones
after he started hiding for the holiday season!!!)


Cheers

Col

1. http://svnweb.mageia.org/packages/cauldron/dracut/current/SOURCES/



-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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