This is an attempt to improve #8228 a bit, by extending the /run/nologin
a bit, but still keeping it somewhat brief.
On purpose I used the vague wording "unprivileged user" rather than
"non-root user" so that pam_nologin can be updated to disable its
behaviour for members of the "wheel" group one day, and our messages
would still make sense.
See #8228.
Various operations done by systemd-tmpfiles may only be safely done at
boot (e.g. removal of X lockfiles in /tmp, creation of /run/nologin).
Other operations may be done at any point in time (e.g. setting the
ownership on /{run,var}/log/journal). This distinction is largely
orthogonal to the type of operation.
A new switch --unsafe is added, and operations which should only be
executed during bootup are marked with an exclamation mark in the
configuration files. systemd-tmpfiles.service is modified to use this
switch, and guards are added so it is hard to re-start it by mistake.
If we install a new version of systemd, we actually want to enforce
some changes to tmpfiles configuration immediately. This should now be
possible to do safely, so distribution packages can be modified to
execute the "safe" subset at package installation time.
/run/nologin creation is split out into a separate service, to make it
easy to override.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1043212https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1045849
Steve Traylen