It seems that dracut can't handle init=/bin/bash. My system uses LVM on LUKS as root, but if I boot with init=/bin/bash, nothing happens, not even a plymouth password prompt. Presumably the init option should work by running dracut as usual but then launching /bin/bash instead of systemd once the real root is mounted. I'm happy to debug, but I've never been very good at figuring out what systemd is thinking when it's just sitting there blinking at me.
It looks like this is supposed to work. systemctl (at least the upstream version) has explicit support for init= in /proc/cmdline, and initrd-switch-root.service executes that code. So the problem is that the boot process isn't getting that far.
Can you check with an initramfs from an older dracut? This may have been broken by the recent dracut update (along with other things).
so far I've tested it works without encrypted partitions with both old and new dracut, will test with encrypted partitions next.
seems to be broken even with the original F20 dracut, if you have encrypted / partition. whether you boot with 'rhgb' or not, boot sequence reaches "Started Forward Password Requests to Plymouth." and then just sits there.
This might be plymouth failing? Reassigning to plymouth to get a comment, if "init=.." is special for plymouth and why it influences the behaviour in the initrd. Question for the reporter: Does it work, if you add "rd.plymouth=0 plymouth.enable=0" to the kernel cmdline?
just to confirm harald's theory - yes, that does make it work. Seems to be plymouth at fault here.
hmm, tricky. plymouth normally takes over the keyboard during boot (to handle password requests and escape to toggle between splash and details). if init=/bin/sh is on the kernel command line, we don't take over the keyboard since we want the keyboard to be available for /bin/sh. I guess there are two possible fixes: 1) treat init=/bin/sh like plymouth.enable=0 2) take the keyboard like usual, but relinquish right before switching out of the initrd.
note you'd at least want to handle 'init=/bin/bash' and 'init=/bin/sh' if you wanted to go the 'special treatment' route - you'll find both commonly used, in Google searches. I don't know if you want to be nice to zsh fans. =)
the code at the moment looks for init= on the front and sh on the back.
Just confirmed this bug is still present in RHEL7 and Fedora21 if full disk encryption is enabled. The work around is to add init=/bin/bash plymouth.enable=0 to the end of the line. If you do not see the prompt for the password, hold backspace for a few seconds and you will see the prompt, type in luks password.
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Per #c10, this is still valid at least for 21, very likely still in Rawhide.
Can confirm, this is still present in Fedora22 which I used fedup to get to. Work around still works the same. init=/bin/bash plymouth.enable=0
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