I made a vbox installation of jessie-sysv.3, upgraded to ascii (testing) and made a snapshot with refractasnapshot-9.3.2. That version creates files in /dev in the snapshot. Boot failed and dropped to busybox.
Dropped back to refractasnapshot-9.2.2. That one patches /usr/share/initramfs-tools/init. That snapshot boots.
Looks like I can't pull initramfs-tools from ceres yet, initscripts needs to catch up. (can't copy/paste it right now.)
On a less bright note, it seems that openssh-server depends on libsystemd0.