System dropping into emergency target with "systemd-journald[<pid>]: Failed to open runtime journal: No such file or directory"

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 and it's service packs
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and it's service packs

Situation

System boots up very slowly, printing messages like:

[ 124.566003] systemd-journald[627]: Failed to open runtime journal: No such file or directory
[ 124.573039] systemd-journald[628]: Failed to open runtime journal: No such file or directory
[ 124.579604] systemd-journald[634]: Failed to open runtime journal: No such file or directory
[ 124.585817] systemd-journald[636]: Failed to open runtime journal: No such file or directory
[ 124.590887] systemd-journald[640]: Failed to open runtime journal: No such file or directory

and on the console one can see that systemd-journald.service is failing multiple times

System seems to hang every now and then and does not finish booting.

It may even greet the user as "New installation" and ask for a locale to be set.

Finally it drops into emergency target asking for the root password.

Resolution

Log in as root user and either create an empty file /etc/machine-id which will be populated upon next reboot, or better run:

systemd-machine-id-setup

Cause

File /etc/machine-id is missing from the system.

/etc/machine-id contains a unique identifier for the system.

Journald uses this identifier to store it's journal in /run/log/journal/<machine-id>/

systemd-journald.service fails if it can't access or create the directory.

Since journald is considered critical, boot will fail and the system ends in emergency target.

If /etc/machine-id is empty, systemd will populate it during boot, problem only exists if /etc/machine-id is missing.

Additional Information

SUSE engineering is aware of the problem and this document will be updated once a fix is available.

Regarding the "New installation" and local settings asked, this is caused by systemd-firstboot service which get's activated if machine-id is not available.

Disclaimer

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