These units are needed to be able to experiment with systemd's boot counting
functionality (e.g. with out-of-tree bootloaders like lanzaboote), and they
cannot easily be added through configuration without patching nixpkgs.
They are basically a no-op when boot entries do not contain any
counters, so AFAICT there is no disadvantage to them being enabled by default.
`switch-to-configuration boot` was taking suspiciously long on a machine
of mine where the boot partition is on a slow SD card. Some tracing led
me to discover that it was in fact deleting all the kernels and initrds
every time, only to rewrite them.
This turned out to be because of the naive (non-path-normalising) string
concatenation used to construct paths in `known_paths`, so all the files
were recognised as obsolete and deleted:
known_paths=['/EFI/nixos/5jz3m9df1cbxn4hzjjs3aaz8lb9vvimc-linux-6.15.7-Image.efi', '/EFI/nixos/xri8qzfvzclf89x7nfwgq248miw7jbp0-initrd-linux-6.15.7-initrd.efi', '/EFI/nixos/b18llskzrcdgw2nbib58qqcaabiik6yc-linux-6.16-Image.efi', '/EFI/nixos/mdj53j746bii1vw227dfhkyd8ajwab2w-initrd-linux-6.16-initrd.efi', '/EFI/nixos/b18llskzrcdgw2nbib58qqcaabiik6yc-linux-6.16-Image.efi', '/EFI/nixos/mdj53j746bii1vw227dfhkyd8ajwab2w-initrd-linux-6.16-initrd.efi', '/EFI/nixos/b18llskzrcdgw2nbib58qqcaabiik6yc-linux-6.16-Image.efi', '/EFI/nixos/mdj53j746bii1vw227dfhkyd8ajwab2w-initrd-linux-6.16-initrd.efi', '/EFI/nixos/5jz3m9df1cbxn4hzjjs3aaz8lb9vvimc-linux-6.15.7-Image.efi', '/EFI/nixos/1ihk03c1i5518hlgm5mnhrig2hy3hq24-initrd-linux-6.15.7-initrd.efi', '/EFI/nixos/5jz3m9df1cbxn4hzjjs3aaz8lb9vvimc-linux-6.15.7-Image.efi', '/EFI/nixos/1ihk03c1i5518hlgm5mnhrig2hy3hq24-initrd-linux-6.15.7-initrd.efi', '/EFI/nixos/5jz3m9df1cbxn4hzjjs3aaz8lb9vvimc-linux-6.15.7-Image.efi', '/EFI/nixos/1ihk03c1i5518hlgm5mnhrig2hy3hq24-initrd-linux-6.15.7-initrd.efi']
path='/boot//EFI/nixos/5jz3m9df1cbxn4hzjjs3aaz8lb9vvimc-linux-6.15.7-Image.efi'
path='/boot//EFI/nixos/xri8qzfvzclf89x7nfwgq248miw7jbp0-initrd-linux-6.15.7-initrd.efi'
path='/boot//EFI/nixos/b18llskzrcdgw2nbib58qqcaabiik6yc-linux-6.16-Image.efi'
path='/boot//EFI/nixos/mdj53j746bii1vw227dfhkyd8ajwab2w-initrd-linux-6.16-initrd.efi'
path='/boot//EFI/nixos/1ihk03c1i5518hlgm5mnhrig2hy3hq24-initrd-linux-6.15.7-initrd.efi'
This can be avoided by using pathlib.Path, which normalises paths and
generally provides a more consistent and convenient API. I therefore
went ahead and replaced all use of `str` for path handling with `Path`
in the builder. This may fix some other, similar bugs, as well, but I
haven't checked in detail.
Silences 2 warning messages that appear when using the systemd initrd:
1. "System tainted (var-run-bad)": occurs because `/var/run` isn't a
symlink to `/run`. Fixed by making /run and linking /var/run to it.
2. "Failed to make /usr a mountpoint": occurs because ProtectSystem
defaults to true in the initrd, which makes systemd try to remount
`/usr` as read-only, which doesn't exist in the initrd. Fixed by
linking `/usr/bin` and `/usr/sbin` to the initrd bin directories.
Also moves the `/tmp` creation from the initrd module to make-initrd-ng,
to avoid making an unnecessary `/tmp/.keep`, saving a store path and a
few bytes in the initrd image.
When a disposition is not set in a user record, systemd determines user
disposition depending on the range the user's UID falls in. For system
users with UIDs above 1000, this will cause them to be incorrectly
identified as "regular" users.
This will cause `userctl` to report the user as a regular user, and more
importantly, `systemd-homed` will not run the first boot user creation
flow, as regular users are already present on the machine (when they are
really system users).
The most common source of high UID system users will undoubtedly be Nix
build users, so the warning provides additional guidance on how to
remove them or adjust their IDs to be within the system range.
The warning is shown only when userdbd/homed is enabled, and the option
to hide the warning is deliberately hidden, to ensure users will have to
read and acknowledge the warning before proceeding, as otherwise users
could end up deploying an OS with no users and no way of creating one
due to the first boot flow being skipped.
Allow building a systemd initrd with a kernel that does not have
modules support enabled (`CONFIG_MODULES=n`), by removing the
assertion and only include the modulesClosure, kmod and support files
if MODULES is enabled or unset in the kernel.
PR #431115 changed extraStructuredConfig to structuredExtraConfig to
follow the deprecation warning about `extraConfig`. However,
`extraStructuredConfig` was mentioned in several places in the docs that
weren't addressed. Also, using this would silently fail since the code
in question would still accept the old key.
This patch updates the docs accordingly and throws an error if the
code-path is reached and `extraStructuredConfig` is being used.
This option is made uncondiotional in systemd 258 [1].
Earlier, it defaulted to true on kernels newer than 4.15,
which applies to all supported nixos kernels.
This means removing the option does not change behavior.
[1] 29da53dde3
