The specific header file is probably not copyrightable anyway, since
it's so trivial, but let's still add the SPDX header line so that a
systematic check for the line does't spit out this header needlessly.
Users might end up with more than one of those service enabled, through
admin mistake, or broken installation scriptlets, or whatever. On my machine,
I had both chronyd and timesyncd happilly running at the same time. If
more than one is enabled, it's better to have just one running. Adding
Conflicts will make the issue more visible in logs too.
Priority is 80. At least in Fedora, chrony uses 50, and ntpd 60.
timesyncd has lower priority, because if people install those other packages,
it's most likely on purpose. timesyncd is always installed and provides
less functionality.
We removed support for foreign services (and ntp-units.d/) in b72ddf0f4.
Support for foreign services was added back in 5d280742, but through an
environment variable.
The problem with the env var approach is that it only works as a mechanism
to select one item, and doesn't work nicely as a mechinism to create a list
of items through drop-ins (because the env var can be easily overridden, but not
extended). Having a list of "ntp providers" is important to be able to reliably disable
all of them when that is requested.
Another problem is that nobody ever bothered to care about our new "standard".
ntp-units.d/ is a nice simple format that works and is already supported by
chrony and ntpd and timedatex. If we were to introduce and ask people to follow
a new standard, there should be some good reason for this. The idea with env
vars has lower functionality, requires systemd-specific syntax. We should just
re-adopt the format that we originally introduced and that seems to work for
everyone, and more on to more interesting problems.
In recent systemd-nspawn we wouldn't parse init args like systemd.log-level=debug.
This is because we wouldn't even look at /proc/1/cmdline.
$ systemd-nspawn -n cat /proc/1/stat
1 (cat) R 0 1 1 34816 ....
^^^^^
34816 is 136:0 a.k.a. /dev/pts/0.
This patch introduces the systemd pstore service which will archive the
contents of the Linux persistent storage filesystem, pstore, to other storage,
thus preserving the existing information contained in the pstore, and clearing
pstore storage for future error events.
Linux provides a persistent storage file system, pstore[1], that can store
error records when the kernel dies (or reboots or powers-off). These records in
turn can be referenced to debug kernel problems (currently the kernel stuffs
the tail of the dmesg, which also contains a stack backtrace, into pstore).
The pstore file system supports a variety of backends that map onto persistent
storage, such as the ACPI ERST[2, Section 18.5 Error Serialization] and UEFI
variables[3 Appendix N Common Platform Error Record]. The pstore backends
typically offer a relatively small amount of persistent storage, e.g. 64KiB,
which can quickly fill up and thus prevent subsequent kernel crashes from
recording errors. Thus there is a need to monitor and extract the pstore
contents so that future kernel problems can also record information in the
pstore.
The pstore service is independent of the kdump service. In cloud environments
specifically, host and guest filesystems are on remote filesystems (eg. iSCSI
or NFS), thus kdump relies [implicitly and/or explicitly] upon proper operation
of networking software *and* hardware *and* infrastructure. Thus it may not be
possible to capture a kernel coredump to a file since writes over the network
may not be possible.
The pstore backend, on the other hand, is completely local and provides a path
to store error records which will survive a reboot and aid in post-mortem
debugging.
Usage Notes:
This tool moves files from /sys/fs/pstore into /var/lib/systemd/pstore.
To enable kernel recording of error records into pstore, one must either pass
crash_kexec_post_notifiers[4] to the kernel command line or enable via 'echo Y
> /sys/module/kernel/parameters/crash_kexec_post_notifiers'. This option
invokes the recording of errors into pstore *before* an attempt to kexec/kdump
on a kernel crash.
Optionally, to record reboots and shutdowns in the pstore, one can either pass
the printk.always_kmsg_dump[4] to the kernel command line or enable via 'echo Y >
/sys/module/printk/parameters/always_kmsg_dump'. This option enables code on the
shutdown path to record information via pstore.
This pstore service is a oneshot service. When run, the service invokes
systemd-pstore which is a tool that performs the following:
- reads the pstore.conf configuration file
- collects the lists of files in the pstore (eg. /sys/fs/pstore)
- for certain file types (eg. dmesg) a handler is invoked
- for all other files, the file is moved from pstore
- In the case of dmesg handler, final processing occurs as such:
- files processed in reverse lexigraphical order to faciliate
reconstruction of original dmesg
- the filename is examined to determine which dmesg it is a part
- the file is appended to the reconstructed dmesg
For example, the following pstore contents:
root@vm356:~# ls -al /sys/fs/pstore
total 0
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 0 May 9 09:50 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 0 May 9 09:50 ..
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1610 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337601001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1778 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337602001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1726 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337603001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1746 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337604001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1686 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337605001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1690 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337606001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1775 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337607001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1811 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337608001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1817 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337609001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1795 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337710001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1770 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337711001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1796 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337712001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1787 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337713001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1808 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337714001
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1754 May 9 09:49 dmesg-efi-155741337715001
results in the following:
root@vm356:~# ls -al /var/lib/systemd/pstore/155741337/
total 92
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 9 09:50 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 40 May 9 09:50 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1610 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337601001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1778 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337602001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1726 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337603001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1746 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337604001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1686 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337605001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1690 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337606001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1775 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337607001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1811 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337608001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1817 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337609001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1795 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337710001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1770 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337711001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1796 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337712001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1787 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337713001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1808 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337714001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1754 May 9 09:50 dmesg-efi-155741337715001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 26754 May 9 09:50 dmesg.txt
where dmesg.txt is reconstructed from the group of related
dmesg-efi-155741337* files.
Configuration file:
The pstore.conf configuration file has four settings, described below.
- Storage : one of "none", "external", or "journal". With "none", this
tool leaves the contents of pstore untouched. With "external", the
contents of the pstore are moved into the /var/lib/systemd/pstore,
as well as logged into the journal. With "journal", the contents of
the pstore are recorded only in the systemd journal. The default is
"external".
- Unlink : is a boolean. When "true", the default, then files in the
pstore are removed once processed. When "false", processing of the
pstore occurs normally, but the pstore files remain.
References:
[1] "Persistent storage for a kernel's dying breath",
March 23, 2011.
https://lwn.net/Articles/434821/
[2] "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface Specification",
version 6.2, May 2017.
https://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/ACPI_6_2.pdf
[3] "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Specification",
version 2.8, March 2019.
https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Spec_2_8_final.pdf
[4] "The kernel’s command-line parameters",
https://static.lwn.net/kerneldoc/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.html
This file was testing a mix of functions from src/core/load-fragment.c and some
from src/shared/install.c. Let's name it more appropriately. I want to add
tests for the new unit-file.c too.
Lennart Poettering