Ubuntu
upstart package

upstart 1.4-0ubuntu7 causes systems with custom kernel not to boot

Bug #936293 reported by Michael Marley on 2012-02-19

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #936667: Upstart early job logging causes boot failure for systems with no initramfs (error is "No available ptys"). Edit Remove

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	upstart (Ubuntu)	New	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

Upstart 1.4-0ubuntu7 has caused two of my systems with custom kernels to fail to boot again. This appears to have to do with boot logging, which caused the same problem in a previous release and was re-enabled for 1.4-0ubuntu7. When attempting to boot the custom kernel, the system just sits there flashing the cursor instead of doing anything useful. Reverting to 1.4-0ubuntu6 works around the problem.

Revision history for this message

James Hunt (jamesodhunt) wrote on 2012-02-20:

Is it possible your kernels are configured without ptys? Current Ubuntu kernels specify the following pty options:

CONFIG_UNIX98_PTYS=y
CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS=y
CONFIG_LEGACY_PTY_COUNT=0

Revision history for this message

Michael Marley (mamarley) wrote on 2012-02-20:

config-3.3.0-rc4+ Edit (73.9 KiB, text/plain)

They both have ptys enabled, with exactly the same configuration options as above. I have attached one of the .config files.

Probably the most significant change I made was disabling initramfs support. Other than that, my changes were mainly just compiling everything I needed into the kernel and not compiling anything I knew I didn't need.

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James Hunt (jamesodhunt) wrote on 2012-02-20:

OK, sounds like you're in unchartered territory then. Try adding "init=/bin/sh" to the grub command line and booting, then:

1) See what "ulimit -n" shows.

If it is < 1024, that might be your problem so try setting 'nofile' manually to atleast 1024 and then manually exec-ing upstart:

ulimit -n 1024
exec /sbin/init --debug </dev/console >/dev/console 2>&1

2) If (1) doesn't appear to be the problem check your root disk is mounted as expected. Is it mounted read-write? Does the following help:

mount -oremount,rw /
exec /sbin/init --debug </dev/console >/dev/console 2>&1