https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1033604
--- Comment #23 from Kay Sievers kay@redhat.com --- (In reply to Daniel Walsh from comment #22)
There is nothing mounted on /sys/fs/cgroup. Shouldn't systemd see this and do nothing with cgroups?
Systemd requires cgroups (the grouping, not the controllers). Systemd would better make it fail properly here, explaining what went wrong, instead of trying to go ahead without cgroups and crash.
There once was the idea to be able to run systemd in degraded mode without cgroups, this code path is not used or tested anywhere and I doubt that this mode will be too useful today, random stuff will just fail in weird ways.
The container environment has to setup and provide access to the cgroups tree for systemd to work as expected.