[systemd-devel] Fall back to shell and still see failure

[Chris Morin]

Hi

  During a normal boot on my system, the last service to launch starts
a special shell which isn't your standard linux shell. Unfortunately,
before getting to that service, there is a long chain of dependencies
which have to run. I want to drop to a normal linux shell when any of
these dependencies fail to be able to jump right into debugging it.

I set the "OnFailure" option of the last service to
"emergency.target". This works great. The only issue is that the shell
appears before systemd has a chance to display which service actually
failed.

 I can obviously check which service failed with "systemctl --failed"
but I'd like to have it displayed during boot as it normally is.

I'm assuming I can't see the failure message because emergency.service
grabs control of the console before systemd can print out it's
message. Is this the case? Is there any way to get what I'm looking
for?