[systemd-devel] Semantic of WantedBy=default.target

Silvio Knizek killermoehre at gmx.net
Tue Aug 12 08:59:16 UTC 2025


Am Dienstag, dem 12.08.2025 um 11:02 +0300 schrieb Andrei Borzenkov:
> 
> I spent some time trying to understand why a service that should have
> been started was not. It turned out rather simple - the service was
> WantedBy=default.target, I explicitly used "3" on the kernel command
> line and this made systemd to ignore
> /etc/systemd/system/default.target.wants.
> 
> Is there any reason to *not* treat systemd.unit as default in this
> case? After all, "default target" is the target that systemd starts
> when running as /sbin/init and passing systemd.unit is entirely
> equivalent to overriding default.target once at run-time.

Hi Andrei,

`3` on the k-c-l means "isolate into multi-user.target", not "make the multi-user.target the default.target" or "isolate into default.target".

So your `default.target` was never started.

If you want *default* behaviour, don't specify anything.

BR  
Silvio
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