Bug#939168: systemd: LXC container fails to start after stretch->buster update inside container

[Sergey Aleynikov]

Source: systemd
Version: 241-5
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?
I'm running LXC containers (lxc version 1:2.0.7-2+deb9u2) on debian stretch. I have several containers
with different debian versions inside. After I've done stretch->buster upgrade in one of them, it stopped
working with 'lxc-start: tools/lxc_start.c: main: 366 The container failed to start.' message.

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?

This is a reproducible sequence:

lxc-create -n testupg -t download # choose debian - stretch - amd64
lxc-start -n testupg
lxc-attach -n testupg
# inside container
vi /etc/apt/sources.list # change stretch -> buster
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
exit
# outside of container
lxc-stop -n testupg
lxc-start -n testupg # won't work

I'd expect containers to keep working after dist-upgrade.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.9
  APT prefers oldstable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'oldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-9-amd64 (SMP w/56 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)