Ohh... I have sooooo many issues with systemd. The core systemd is fine, and the ideas behind it are sound.

But it lacks any consistency. It's not a cohesive project with a vision, it's a collection of tools without any overarching idea. This is reflected in its documentation, it's an OK reference manual, but go on and try to build a full picture of system startup.

To give you concrete examples:

1. Systemd has mount units, that you would expect to behave like regular units but for mounts. Except that they don't. You can specify the service retry/restart policy for regular units, including start/stop timeouts, but not for mounts.

2. Except that you can, but only if you use the /etc/fstab compat.

3. Except that you can not, if systemd thinks that your mounts are "local". How does it determine if mounts are local? By checking its mount device.

4. Systemd has separate behaviors for network and local filesystems.

5. One fun example of above, there's a unit that fires up after each system update. It inserts itself _before_ the network startup. Except that in my case, the /dev/sda is actually an iSCSI device and so it's remote. So systemd deadlocks, but only after a system update. FUN!!!

6. How does systemd recognize network filesystems? Why, it has a pre-configured list of them: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/4c6afaab193fcdcb1f5a... Yes, you read it correctly. A low-level mount code has special case for sshfs, that it detects by string-matching.

7. But you can override it, right? Nope. This list is complete and authoritative. Nobody would ever need fuse.s3fs . And if you do, see figure 1.

I can go on for a looooong time.

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nomel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

5 and 6 sounds like good candidates for a bug reports/PR, if there's not already some "right" way to do it.

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cyberax an hour ago | parent [-]

They're already reported. And ignored. Have you _seen_ the systemd issue backlog?

The iSCSI loop issue: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/34164 It keeps popping up again and again and is summarily ignored.

The remote FS detection also came up multiple times, and the maintainers don't care.

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nomel an hour ago | parent [-]

> and the maintainers don't care.

I'm not sure that's fair. I think better proof of this would be a rejected PR rather than a neglected bug report.

This is Linux, after all. Problems found with specific hardware are almost always solved by people with that hardware, not the maintainers, who are usually busy with the 99%.

	▲	cyberax 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The problem here is more fundamental. Lennart refused to make all the /etc/fstab options available in regular mount units. And yes, there was an issue, no I'm too tired to look for it. The wording was pretty much: "Give up, and gtfo, this is not going to happen. Just because." I'm convinced that systemd can't be fixed by its current team of maintainers. They are just... untidy. I don't know about you, but if I end up writing low-level code that _needs_ to know whether the mounted file system is "remote", I won't do that by comparing against a hard-coded list of filesystems inside PID0. Or by using wild heuristics ("if it's on a block device, then it's local"). I would put these heuristics in a helper tool that populates the default values for mount units. Then allow users to override them as needed. With a separate inspector tool to flag possible loops.