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After hardly rebooting my raspberry pi 2 running raspian it does not work anymore, when I turn it on everything works fine until this error message shows up repeatedly.

[FAILED] Failed to start udev Kernel Device Manager

The machine then goes to emergency mode. I didn't find any answer online, any ideas?

goldilocks
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Liam Giannini
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6 Answers6

13

It might be interesting to know which version you are running, and if you happened to update packages recently.

I encountered a similar error message on my raspberry pi2 after upgrading to raspbian testing today (from stretch). However I fear that it may be caused by a full range of different reasons.

The more precise error message I got (from journalctl -u systemd-udevd) was:

Sep 27 16:33:46 raspberrypi systemd-udevd[10856]: /lib/systemd/systemd-udevd: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libarmmem.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Operation not permitted

It does not seem to be related to lib/systemd/systemd-udevd itself. Indeed, if I systemctl restart another service, I get a similar error:

root@raspberrypi:/home/pi# systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd.service
Job for systemd-timesyncd.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl  status systemd-timesyncd.service" and "journalctl  -xe" for details.
root@raspberrypi:/home/pi# journalctl  -xe
[...]
Sep 27 18:54:50 raspberrypi systemd-timesyncd[26811]: /lib/systemd/systemd-timesyncd: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libarmmem.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Operation not permitted
[...]

My understanding is that systemd runs binaries in an environment that clashes with a relocation that is used in libarmmem.so. That is either a bug in systemd (version 234-3 here), or in the package that provides libarmmem.so (raspi-copies-and-fills, version 0.6 from stretch here).

systemd of course is essential, while raspi-copies-and-fills is not (it's an important optimization, but the system can run without it). I solved my problem with the following interim solution:

root@raspberrypi:/home/pi# apt purge raspi-copies-and-fills

Clearly, I'll monitor the possible updates to raspi-copies-and-fills (so far at version 0.6), hoping to get both a bootable system and the fast memcpy's.

EThome
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7

As of systemd 235-2 this still continues with the exact same error.

For people landing here from google:

If you see that after apt dist-upgrade that either udev, journald or even timesyncd are crashing,

Until raspi-copies-and-fills, is updated, purging it like Emmanuel Thomé suggested is the only viable solution so far.

wadge
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2

Rebuilding raspi-copies-and-fills from https://github.com/bavison/arm-mem fixes this in buster.

vhdirk
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I had the same issue with my pi-3 and raspi-copies-and-fills installed. Udev/systemd 232-25+deb9u1 was the last working version. All updates to a newer udev version failed and i was always forced to revert to 232-25+deb9u1

Now i have removed raspi-copies-and-fills and updating to 239-7 worked without error.

user170045
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I had a similar issue after upgrading from Raspbian 8 to Raspbian 9. After udev package was upgrading to latest backport version, the raspberry was booting in emergency mode :

Welcome to emergency mode! After logging in,type "journalctl -xb" to view
system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, "systemctl default" or ^D
to try again to boot into default mode.
Give root password for maintainence
(or type control-D to continue):

removing raspi-copies-and-fills solve it !!

Damien L.
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0

I ran into the same issue today after upgrading to Raspbian buster. I was able to get the system booting again after purging version 0.11 of raspi-copies-and-fills from recovery mode as per @emmanuel-thomé 's answer.

Given @vhdirk's answer (that a rebuild from arm-mem source works), here's how I rebuilt a new raspi-copies-and-fills package...

I pulled the upstream (arm-mem) and RPi-Distro repos, then bumped the version to 0.12 (the udev 241-5 package blacklists prior raspi-copies-and-fills versions).

git clone https://github.com/p00ya/arm-mem.git -b p00ya
cd arm-mem
debuild -b -uc -us
sudo dpkg -i ../raspi-copies-and-fills_0.12+nmu1_armhf.deb

This seems to work (tested with sudo systemctl restart udev after installation).

p00ya
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