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> So (a bit off-topic) what was wrong with autofs as a separate small process
> started only when it was necessary? Do you remember that?
Having automount support directly in pid1 allows automounts to be part
of the unit graph — with dependencies and triggering and failure actions.
The code to talk to the kernel interface is rather simple. The part
to tie into the rest of the unit framework is bigger. Having a separate
daemon would only make that bigger part even more complicated.
Still it does not explain why automonting cannot be just a regular unit with a separated process.
That way it still can be part of the "the unit graph", and both systemd units and SMF services are using dependencies.
As communication with kennel space is done over /de/autofs and just checked and autofs and systemd are using that interface almost the same way.
At the moment it seems that the autofs bit is used only to mout per logged user tmpfs which looks like it could be mounted/umounted using the user systemd unit WITHOUT automounter. Am I right? If yes, using the automonter is kind of overkill because all that could be done without autofs. Instead have in kernel autofs and in userspace communication over /dev/autofs thi could be done with a top 0.5KB systemd unit yext file which will execute mount/umount commands with some exact params.
kloczek