Boot problem with systemd and 12.1 Factory

After a ‘zypper up’ on October 13, I was unable to boot my computer normally
with 12.1. It did boot in failsafe mode. In addition, it was not possible to
switch to booting with SystemV using either “init=/sbin/init” or F5 from the
GRUB screen.

The problem was found by adding


systemd.log_level=debug systemd.log_target=kmsg

to the GRUB options line. From the messages on the screen, I could see that the
NFS mounts were failing. Booting was unable to proceed until the NFS mounts were
successful, but the network was not up until I was logged in!

A work around is to edit file /etc/init.d/nfs. Find the line that says


mount -at nfs,nfs4 || rc_failed 1

and replace it with


sleep 2 && mount -at nfs,nfs4 &
sleep 2

This change will allow the NFS mounts to proceed in the background. As a result,
the system can continue booting.