I also can confirm that booting is not possible in testing any more: Kernel 6.11.9 and 6.11.7 and systemd v257~rc2-3 in a standard grub/efi/ext setup without cryptofs or similar on a sata ssd (so probably better to change the title of the thread). This happens since the upgrade which (among others) installed systemd v257~rc2-3, which may be the culprit. There is a hang which shows "/dev/sda2 clean ..." (probably the output of fsck). After rebooting several times with CTRL+ALT+DEL, from time to time the system boots successfully. But that is rather seldom.
As far as I can see, What helps ist pressing one or two times the return key after you see "/dev/sda2 clean ...", then the boot process continues. However, that "hot fix" is no real option, as I mostly start via LAN/magic packet and login via ssh from remote. So I cannot press a key/control that in the early boot process. I think this is in fact a _serious_ bug. As there is no obvious logging entry or similar I initially thought, the root cause is a hardware defect. Unfortunately this costed many hours. Interestingly, rather the same configuration boots very well kvm virtualized. Thanks for looking into it, Chris
