Recently I experienced, systemd based container fails to run in certain version of distros.
For ex: If I run my container with systemd I get below messages.
[terminal]
#docker run –rm -t -i –privileged -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup:ro
[/terminal]
[terminal]
systemd 219 running in system mode. (+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA -APPARMOR +SMACK +SYSVINIT +UTMP +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +GNUTLS +ACL +XZ -LZ4 -SECCOMP +BLKID +ELFUTILS +KMOD +IDN)
Detected virtualization docker.
Detected architecture x86-64.
Running with unpopulated /etc.
….
Set hostname to
Initializing machine ID from random generator.
Populated /etc with preset unit settings.
Unit etc-hosts.mount is bound to inactive unit dev-mapper-X.X.root.device. Stopping, too.
Unit etc-hostname.mount is bound to inactive unit dev-mapper-X.X.root.device. Stopping, too….
Unit etc-resolv.conf.mount is bound to inactive unit dev-mapper-X.X.root.device. Stopping, too.
Cannot add dependency job for unit display-manager.service, ignoring: Unit display-manager.service failed to load: No such file or directory.
Startup finished in 106ms.
Failed to create unit file /run/systemd/generator.late/network.service: File exists
Failed to create unit file /run/systemd/generator.late/netconsole.service: File exists
[/terminal]
The line ‘Running with unpopulated /etc’ looked suspicious to me, after some attempts we were able to conclude that, the things were going wrong in absense of ‘/etc/machine-id’ file which used to be there. If you came across similar to this situation, make an entry in your docker file to create /etc/machine-id as shown below and give a try!
[terminal]
#RUN touch /etc/machine-id
[/terminal]
now, build your image and start the container from a new image. Let me know how it goes.