Put time limit on systemd-tmpfiles-setup by default

systemd / systemd

The systemd System and Service Manager

https://systemd.io

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Put time limit on systemd-tmpfiles-setup by default #31641

Closed marekrost closed 6 months ago

marekrost commented 7 months ago

Component

systemd-tmpfiles

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

I have just waited 20 minutes for my computer to boot.

Describe the solution you'd like

There should be a limit on how long the job can run during boot.

Let's say 3 minutes.
It will manage to clean something,
It will bring attention to the fact there is more to be done,
It doesn't block the user for undetermined amount of time. The same way Microsoft Windows used to when it decided to install updates...

Describe alternatives you've considered

I have considered overriding it just myself locally, but I believe this would be better solution as a whole.

The systemd version you checked that didn't have the feature you are asking for

No response

poettering commented 7 months ago

Ahum. Why would that take 3mins? please provide logs.

marekrost commented 7 months ago

I think I've identified what behavior causes the long startup of systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service, I'll get the logs.

marekrost commented 6 months ago

The long boot time seems to be caused by large volume of files inside /tmp on my system. Specifically, these files originate from: https://github.com/wkeeling/selenium-wire/issues/408

Attached boot log from 2 days ago shows that system boot got stuck cleaning up these temporary files for nearly 8 minutes straight.

2024-04-08_boot.log

I suppose the question is - is this correct and expected behavior on the side of systemd-tmpfiles-setup? Or no-one just expected huge amount of files in /tmp?

poettering commented 6 months ago

/tmp/ should be a tmpfs generally. If you distro still is using a traditional fs there, please file a bug. It's 2024.

If it's tmpfs then clean-up is entirely automatic, because it's backed by swap (i.e. can just get lost during boot), rather than a traditional fs (where stuff must be synced to disk), which requires unnecessary write cycles at both shutdown and startup.

Generally, we have to run tmpfiles.d/ stuff during boot, to guarantee that the system is in order (ie. /tmp/ must be rleatively clean so that the system can operate correctly). It's simply not OK to leave stuff half set up.

This seems to be a local misconfiguration mostly the way I see it.

marekrost commented 6 months ago

First of all, thanks for the insight. The machine would be a clean Debian 12.3 install, so I'll look in that direction.

I can see how this is user-related or, at most, distro-specific issue. Patching the time limit would make sense only on distros that both use systemd and do not use on tmpfs on /tmp by default.

I'm closing the feature request.