[systemd-devel] portable service questions

[Chuck Tuffli]

I basically have portable service extensions working, but in the
process, there are a few questions that came up.

1. When attaching a service with an extension, the portablectl list
shows the base image as 'attached' but the extension as 'detached'. Is
the 'detached' state expected or an indication that something is
wrong?

2. When using the default profile, systemd attaches a writable /tmp
and /var/tmp. But the trusted profile doesn't attach either. From
looking at the code, this appears to be expected. For read-only
service images running with the trusted profile, is there a way to get
a writable tmp directories or is the expectation that the base image
is writable?

3. What are some approaches to debugging problems with the service's
environment? Two examples of problems I encountered were 1) the base
image was missing a library the extension depended upon and 2) the
service couldn't create configuration files because of a missing
directory. In both cases, I replaced the ExecStart with 'sleep 1d' and
used 'nsenter --target $(pidof sleep)' to investigate the environment
and figure out where I goofed. Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks!

--chuck