The rescue image is incomplete, which causes systemd to not behave the way
OpenQA expects it to. In particular, the following issues are present:

* /etc/passwd has no entry for the polkit user, even though polkit is installed
in the rescue filesystem. This causes polkit to fail starting, which systemd
does not like. (It can work without polkit, but not with a broken polkit ;-)

* Because /etc/machine-id does not exist, systemd thinks it is in "first boot"
mode. As such, it will run the systemd-firstboot helper utility����� this is why
the next two points ONLY manifest in the rescue system and generally not in an
installed system.

* /etc/locale.conf is missing, which causes systemd-firstboot to prompt for
what the locales should be interactively. OpenQA probably is not expecting this
and fails to find the expected text on the screen within the needle timeout.

* /etc/localtime is missing, which causes systemd-firstboot to prompt for what
the timezone should be interactively. OpenQA probably is not expecting this and
fails to find the expected text on the screen within the needle timeout.

As to why we see garbled text in openQA, I suspect that may have to do with how
the screen is grabbed - or simply because the needles failed anyway and we are
getting an old screenshot. I cannot reproduce the garbled text in VirtualBox in
either VGA text or in various vesafb modes.