I have recently been upgrading my Linux containers from Debian wheezy to jessie, and each time have encountered a problem preventing the container from booting. Or rather as it turns out, preventing the equivalent of init from starting any daemons. Which is systemd of course.
Now this is not some addition to the Great Systemd Debate (although my contribution to that debate may well arrive someday), but a simple fix, or at this stage a workaround (to use the dreaded ITIL phrase).
The fix is to re-install the traditional SystemV init package replacing the new systemd package. This can be done during the upgrade by running the following at the end of the usual process :-
apt-get install sysvinit-core
Of course you will probably be reading this after you have encountered the problem. There are probably many ways of dealing with the situation after you have tried rebooting and encountered this issue, but my choice is to run the following commands from what I tend to call the "global container" :-
chroot ${container root filesystem}
apt-get install sysvinit-core
As mentioned before, this is not a fix. And indeed the problem may be my own fault – perhaps it doesn't help having the "global container" still running wheezy. Perhaps there are some instructions in the Debian upgrade manual that details some extra step you should run. And of course by switching back to System V init, we are missing out on all of the systemd fun.