How to debug Systemd problems

Foreword

If you are experiencing a problem with system boot up due to Systemd, please see the common bugs document before filing a bug. Some easy configuration tweaks that fix a wide range of issues may be listed there. If the problem you are seeing is not listed there or none of the workarounds seem to help, please consider filing a bug to help us make Fedora run better on your hardware.

Be prepared to include some information (logs) about your system as well. These should be complete (no snippets please), not in an archive, uncompressed, with MIME type set as text/plain.

Identifying your problem area

1. Remove rhgb and quiet from the kernel command line.
2. Add systemd.log_level=debug to the kernel command line to log systemd with debug output enabled.
3. Add systemd.log_target=kmsg to the kernel command line to let systemd buffer to be written to the kernel log buffer.
4. Run /bin/systemd --test --system from command line to test run init as systemd.
5. Run echo "openvt -c9 /bin/sh" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit to enable shell on tty9 to run various systemctl commands to diagnose problems further.

Information to include in your report

All bug reports

In all cases, the following should be mentioned and attached to your bug report:

• The exact kernel command-line used. Typically from the bootloader configuration file (e.g. /etc/grub.conf) or from /proc/cmdline
• A copy of /var/log/messages
• The output of the dmesg command dmesg > dmesg.txt
• Systemd dump systemctl dump > systemd_dump.txt

Additional systemd boot parameters

The following boot parameters are also available to further assist with debugging boot issues.

#TODO