[systemd-devel] SOLVED: daemon-reload does not pick up changes to /etc/systemd/system during boot

[Alex Aminoff]

On 10/13/22 09:20, Alex Aminoff wrote:
>
> On 10/13/22 07:59, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> On Mi, 12.10.22 16:54, Alex Aminoff (aminoff at nber.org) wrote:
>>
>>> As soon as the system is up I can ssh in and run systemctl start 
>>> autofs and
>>> it works just fine. In journalctl -b I can see my rc.initdiskless 
>>> running
>>> followed by the daemon-reload. But no autofs and no evidence that 
>>> systemd
>>> tried to start autofs.
>>>
>>> My only guess is that somehow daemon-reload is not enough because as 
>>> far as
>>> systemd is concerned we already queued up for starting all the services
>>> needed by multi-user.target back when we switched root from the
>>> initrd.
>> daemon-reload just tells PID 1 to reload units, it has no direct 
>> effect on
>> the job queue, it won't enqueue any deps that might have been added.
>>
>> You can issue "systemctl start --no-block multi-user.target" to
>> reenqueue multi-user.target again which will then also reenqueue all
>> its deps again, taking the new deps into consideration.
>>
>> An alternative is to use add in Upholds= type deps from
>> multi-user.target to your service. That (somewhat recently added) dep
>> type has a "continious" effect: whenever a unit is up that has a dep
>> (or multiple of this kind it will have the effect that the listed dep
>> will be started if not running. It means "systemctl stop" of a
>> dependent service will be immediately undone though, i.e. it has quite
>> different semantics from the usual Wants=.
>
> Thank you and Andrei for your helpful hints. I will research Upholds= 
> but I am hopeful that systemctl start --no-block multi-user.target 
> will work. Will test. Fortunately most of the stuff I am starting up 
> based on the new /etc is pretty late in boot; if that were not the 
> case I could likewise systemctl start some other target.
>
>
Just to close out this thread, I am happy to report that

ExecStart=systemctl start --no-block multi-user.target

worked great.