Greetings. It has been a while since I last checked in. Thought I'd let the rest of the Alpha community know I'm still around :-).
I'm up and running on kernel version 5.2.0, built from the kernel.org source tree as is my usual pattern. The previous kernel running on my system was 5.1.0-rc7. Between then and today, something changed in user space that made the expected drop into systemd's "emergency mode" more painful than usual. First, "systemd" still cannot handle systems with persistent filesystems other than "/" and "/usr". As far as I know, the bug report I filed against "systemd" is still open, and no progress has been made on that front. The added complication when I rebooted the system today was multiple processes attempting to read input from the console at the same time. Both the old kernel and the new one behaved identically, which is why I'm assuming a problem with userspace. If you immediately type in the "root" password when prompted (without waiting for additional background init tasks to finish), things work normally up to the point where the console font gets loaded. Sometime after that, part of what you type goes to the command line, and the rest goes to ???. Tty echo is disabled, so you can't tell which input characters are going to the interactive shell, and which ones are going to ???. A workaround I discovered by accident is to keep typing "<cntl-D>\n" until the "emergency mode" shell exits and "systemd" attempts to continue with normal startup. That fails, and "systemd" drops back into "emergency mode" again. However, only an interactive shell is listening at that point, so you can go about the usual cleanup tasks (run "fsck" on the remaining filesystems, mount them, bring up the primary network interface, etc.), and *then* type "<cntl-D>" to continue with normal system startup. If you wait until *after* the console font gets loaded before trying to type the "root" password, the only way forward might be to try typing "<cntl-D>\n" multiple times until "systemd" attempts to continue with normal startup, fails, and then drops you back into "emergency mode" again. I didn't try that. Typing "<cntl><alt><del>" works, at least, to restart the system and give you another crack at entering the "root" password immediately after the "emergency mode" prompt appears. No idea which startup process is competing with the "emergency mode" interactive shell for input from the console keyboard. --Bob