/var to mount over is not empty

[Chris Murphy]

On May 15, 2014, at 6:32 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2014-05-15 at 18:22 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> This happens on both F20 and Rawhide with separately mounted /var.
>> 
>> [    2.839950] f20v.localdomain systemd[1]: Mounting /var...
>> [    2.840310] f20v.localdomain systemd[1]: var.mount: Directory /var to mount over is not empty, mounting anyway.
>> 
>> The thing being created in the underlying /var before mounting is:
>> /var/lib/dhclient
>> 
>> However, NetworkManager doesn't start dhclient until after the mount. But NetworkManager itself is started up before the /var mount. So I think maybe it's NetworkManager that's creating the folder. But I don't really know.
>> 
>> Can anyone thing of a way to find out what creates this empty directory on startup? My crude idea was to set an selinux label on /var to preventing anything from being created there, and then see what explodes. But I'm not quite sure what chcon command to use. Obviously I'd have to do this on /var when nothing is mounted to it.
> 
> systemd has something that's kinda like the old sysvinit 'interactive'
> step-through mode:
> 
> systemd.confirm_spawn=true
> 
> this may help you if you can find a way to also have a console active
> while you're stepping through the boot.

Boot slows to a crawl and appears to postpone /var mount such that now I have 2 dozen folders created in /var. I was unable to get a debug shell until the moment I was at rescue mode and at that point all of those folders were already created.


Chris Murphy