Kernel panic when dpkg attempts to install libc6

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Steve Langasek (vorlon) pointed out in bug #1269731 that the issue may in fact have been fixed, as I could have been running the old version of upstart when the error occurs.

Running the "telinit u" command after the upgrade seems to confirm this, at it does not cause a kernel panic.

Therefore, I think this was a false alarm.

Steve Langasek (vorlon) is now saying that the bug was in fact introduced after version 13.10, which raises some questions as to why this bug is triggered during upgrades to 14.04.

There is, therefore, a certain probability that users will be affected by this when upgrading to 14.04.

No, what I am saying is that this bug is not a duplicate of bug #1269731 and should not have been marked as one.

Bug #1269731 was only present in a version of upstart introduced in trusty after the 13.10 release. Your bug, since it involves an upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04, is not that bug.

Then I'm marking the bugs as duplicates of this one again, as none of the libc6 bugs should be marked as duplicates of bug #1269731.

Any crasher bug in upstart is a very serious problem which we take seriously. While the issue is resolved for you (since the upgrade is now over), it's important that we find out the cause of the crash on your system, so that it doesn't happen to others.

I understand that you don't have any crash files in /var/crash for this. That's strange, and I'm not sure why that's the case. But there are a few other things we can look at to try to reproduce the problem.

Assuming you were upgrading from 13.10 to 14.04 using update-manager, you should have log files in /var/log/dist-upgrade. Can you please attach the apt.log. apt-term.log, and term.log from this directory?

There have not been other mentions of this bug being seen when upgrading to upstart 1.12, so it is clearly not trivial to reproduce. It may help in reproducing this bug to have a complete copy of your upstart configuration. Can you tar up the contents of your /etc/init directory (tar zcvf ~/upstart-configs.tgz /etc/init) and attach the resulting tarball?

The bug occurs when dpkg tries to install libc6 deb, and this triggers the telinit command.

As you are adamant that this bug is unrelated to the several bugs that are already filed which describe this exact problem, I've decided not to spend any more time on it.

If you wish to investigate the issue yourself, then I recommend you install 13.10 on a system and upgrate it with do-release-upgrade.

Closing. Impossible to reproduce without help from the submitter.

Sorry to wake you guys, but this bug came to me while upgrading from 13.10 to 14.04 now. I tried related WO and could continue the upgrade after creating the softlink /root/bin/telinit -> /dev/true softlink.

Two other users have reported having the bug so far.

And without logs from an affected system, there's still nothing we can do with this report.

I found a another screen picture with what I think is a dump... what other logs can I provide to you?

Softlink been removed and "telinit u" does not report anything now... so I cannot reproduce the error.

Interesting logs are:

* tarball of /etc/init/*
* tarball of /var/log/upstart/
* are you running sessions in chroots? (daemons managed by upstart)

I have exactly the same issue, see question https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/247836