EC2 instances don't have a console, so it's pointless to start
emergency mode if a mount fails. (This happened to me with an
encrypted filesystem where the key wasn't sent on time using "charon
send-keys".) Better to cross fingers and continue booting.
Starting an authenticated root shell is a security hole, so don't do
it by default. The kernel command line parameter
‘initrd.shell_on_fail’ restores the original. (Of course, this only
improves security if you have a password on GRUB to prevent the kernel
command line from being edited by unauthorized users.)
The 'memtest86' package didn't work on any of my machines. 'memtest86plus', on
the other hand, seems to work just fine. Does anyone know why we keep the
seemingly older version around still?
The "S|s|single" option is handled by systemd (starting
rescue.target). And the rescue target basically removes the need for
a special debug shell. (Also, there is "systemd.crash_shell=1" for
starting a shell if systemd crashes.)
Also, symlink kbrequest.target to rescue.target as suggested by the
systemd.special manpage. This way, you can start a sulogin rescue
shell by pressing Alt+Up.
During a configuration switch, changed units are stopped in the old
configuration, then started in the new configuration (i.e. after
running the activation script and running "systemctl daemon-reload").
This ensures that services are stopped using the ExecStop/ExecStopPost
commands from the old configuration.
However, for some services it's undesirable to stop them; in
particular dhcpcd, which deconfigures its network interfaces when it
stops. This is dangerous when doing remote upgrades - usually things
go right (especially because the switch script ignores SIGHUP), but
not always (see 9aa69885f0). Likewise,
sshd should be kept running for as long as possible to prevent a
lock-out if the switch fails.
So the new option ‘stopIfChanged = false’ causes "systemctl restart"
to be used instead of "systemctl stop" followed by "systemctl start".
This is only proper for services that don't have stop commands. (And
it might not handle dependencies properly in some cases, but I'm not
sure.)
This is mainly useful for specifying mounts that depend on other
units. For example sshfs or davfs need network (and possibly
nameservices).
While systemd makes a distinction between local and remote
filesystems, this only works for in-kernel filesystems such as
nfs and cifs.
fuse-based filesystems (such as sshfs and davs) are classified as
local, so they fail without networking. By explicitly declaring these
mounts as full systemd units (as opposed to having systemd generate
them automatically from /etc/fstab), dependencies can be specified as
on every other unit.
In the future, we can probably port NixOS' filesystems handling to use
these native systemd.mount units and skip /etc/fstab altogether, but
this probably requires additional changes, such as starting systemd
even earlier during boot (stage 1).
I'm not any good at perl, and I only came up with this after many
slow attempts. Any review welcome.
But until this, memtest was broken, and extraPrepareConfig as well, in grub.
Having all services with DefaultDependencies=yes depend on
local-fs.target is annoying, because some of those services might be
necessary to mount local filesystems. For instance, Charon's
send-keys feature requires sshd to be running in order to receive LUKS
encryption keys, which in turn requires dhcpcd, and so on. So we drop
this dependency (and swap.target as well for consistency). If
services require a specific mount, they should use RequiresMountsFor
in any case.
