After a lot of testing, I think I've found the cause - when lightdm starts the session init, logind is supposed to setup the cgroups. But that isn't happening.
Normally, logind would do that by asking systemd, but in our case it talks to systemd-shim. sytemd-shim then asks cgmanager to create the cgroups. However, currently systemd-shim does not fail if cgmanager cannot be contacted. So I think the proper fix is to change systemd- shim to either block or fail hard if cgmanager is not contactable or unable to create the requested cgroups. It would also be beneficial to arrange for systemd-shim output to be captured since currently all stdout and stderr is discarded when it is run via /usr/share/dbus-1 /system-services/org.freedesktop.systemd1.service. A "quick fix" however is to change dbus's 'start on' condition to ensure it doesn't start until cgmanager is ready. The simplest fix being: $ echo "start on cgmanager-ready" | sudo tee -a /etc/init/dbus.override -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of DX Packages, which is subscribed to systemd-shim in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1357252 Title: Upstart jobs specifying cgroup fail to start occasionally Status in Ubuntu Application Launcher: Incomplete Status in Upstart: Invalid Status in “cgmanager” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in “systemd-shim” package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: After the ubuntu-app-launch landing in #188 (http://people.canonical.com/~ogra/touch-image-stats/188.changes), UI Toolkit autopilot tests have started failing, see http://ci.ubuntu.com/smokeng/utopic/touch/mako/190:20140815:20140811.1/9676/ubuntuuitoolkit/ and the #188 results too. It's different tests each time, but a bit above 10 of them tend to fail on each full run. Reproducable locally, where I got 11 such failures. To reproduce: [terminal 1] 1. flash/update device if needed 2. adb shell 3. apt install ubuntu-ui-toolkit-autopilot 4. powerd-cli display on bright # leave running, also unlock the screen so that lenses are shown [terminal 2] 5. phablet-config autopilot --dbus-probe enable # wait until finishes 6. phablet-test-run ubuntuuitoolkit A full test suite run will take around 0.5h and should produce a bunch of 'Application failed to start.':s. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-app-launch/+bug/1357252/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~dx-packages Post to : dx-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~dx-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp