Raffaele Belardi wrote:
At this point of the boot process the system did very few things, the problem should be
relatively easy to trace so I refuse to give up. Long nights ahead.
And at this point of the day I give up.
My findings:
- the 'random: crng init done' printed during the boot is the kernel, not OpenRC. The
OpenRC script just manages the seed and does not print that string. So, most probably
OpenRC is never started.
- from the chroot I invoked /sbin/openrc <runlevel>. It spits out errors due to the chroot
environment but other than that seems to work fine for all runlevels. So the init scripts
and /sbin/openrc are fine.
- I also issued startxfce4 from the chroot and got a 'working' GUI. Not very useful but I
was curious.
- one of the init scripts complained that it was unable to open /run and actually the
directory was not present. Possibly it was deleted as a side effect of the system crash?
Anyway, I restored it but no luck.
- I grub-loaded a different kernel, one built for systemd. It stops in the exact same
place as the openrc-built one.
- I recompiled the kernel with openrc and systemd options and made sure it was loaded
(renamed the image file, got grub error, renamed it back, grub happy). I increased the
kernel (I think console message) log level but nothing useful was output.
- /sbin/init is the next possible failure point but without logs there's not much to
debug. I re-emerged sysvinit and openrc but no go.
Ok, I've had enough. Thanks to all who contributed, this issue will remain a
mystery.
raffaele