debugging upstart failure

[Michal Suchanek]

Hello,

I bootstrapped Debian wheezy chroot, installed upstart, cloned it to
half dozen media, added kernel and bootloader to each, put it to
machines for which these kernels are configured, and on two of them
upstart does not boot the system.

I can boot with init=/bin/bash

/var/log/upstart is empty

verbose upstart logs that mountall-net finished on the console init:
startpar-bridge (mountall-net--stopped) state changed from post-stop
to waiting

network is brought up but sshd does not run

getty on console does not run (not sure configuration is correct - had
to hack it myself)

upgrading to jessie does not solve the problem

installing sysvinit makes system bootable

on none of the machines plymouth works. It is somehow half-broken on Debian.

These two broken machines have very different kernel sources so I am
wondering if I am missing a kernel feature,

What kernel features are required to run upstart? eg. udev package in
Debian has a list of kernel symbols it checks and I had to add kernel
feature to install jessie udev on the working machines.

Thanks

Michal