for information. Note the existing bug number
Cheers -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: xenial: Watch out for boot failures due to /etc/mtab file Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2015 14:43:22 +0100 From: Martin Pitt <[email protected]> To: Ubuntu Development <[email protected]> Hello all, /etc/mtab is supposed to be a symlink to /proc/self/mounts (or /proc/mounts) for stuff to work. We've also shipped "debian-fixup.service" since vivid to turn a file into a symlink on boot. However, if you have /etc/mtab as a file (e. g. right after installation), current xenial's systemd will fail hard to boot with something like | systemd [1]: /etc/mtab is not a symlink or not pointing to /proc/self/mounts. This is not supported anymore. Please replace /etc/mtab with a symlink to /proc/self/mounts. | systemd [1]: Freezing execution. This is of course a really harsh failure mode, and it will be changed again in a few weeks or so to merely warn about that. But as these warnings have existed for a long time already, and nobody notices them, having this hard failure mode will actually tell us which places we need to fix. E. g. a week ago debian-installer was fixed [1], and I just heared on IRC that a Xubuntu desktop install fails as well; bug was just filed [2]. We really must stop writing /etc/mtab files. It breaks libmount's monitoring and all kinds of old school software which still reads /etc/mtab directly; ideally they should of course be fixed to look into /proc, and /etc/mtab should just die, but there's still some way to go (e. g. [3]). So for now, if you see a boot failure like this, please report it and ping me, so that we can fix our installers, images etc. to not produce a broken /etc/mtab any more. After that, just remove /etc/mtab (e. g. temporarily boot with upstart) to resume. After we fixed our installers (ubiquity, d-i, cloud-init, etc.), we'll go back to warning (IOW: ignore) mode. Thanks, Martin [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=802187 [2] https://launchpad.net/bugs/1511376 [3] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19108 -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org)
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