[systemd-devel] Infinite loop at startup on var fsck failure

[Vito Caputo]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 03:32:04PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mo, 24.02.20 16:01, Vito Caputo (vcaputo at pengaru.com) wrote:
> 
> > Hello list,
> >
> > Today I experienced an unclean shutdown due to battery dying unexpectedly,
> > and it left my /var in a state requiring a manual fsck to repair errors.
> >
> > The normal startup process failed and dropped me to a rescue shell after
> > asking for my root password.  But I was unable to immediately run fsck
> > manually, because systemd was endlessly trying to fsck /var.
> 
> Hmm, looks like a bug. It shouldn't keep retrying. Something mst
> have pulled in the unit over and over again...
> 
> Any chance you can reproduce this with current systemd, and maybe
> provide logs and put them into a github issue?
> 
> Or do you have logs from the case when this happened around?
>

No logs, since it was /var that needed the fsck, nothing persisted from the
rescue and I was in a cafe at the time trying to boot my laptop to work
on something else.  Regrettably I didn't take the time to copy the volatile
journals somewhere else, I was too annoyed at the time.

What I'm hearing is that this isn't a known fixed issue, which is concerning.
If I get a chance I'll poke at a repro, but it's pretty low on the priority
list at the moment.

Thanks for the response!

Regards,
Vito Caputo