IIRC, enable/disable/is-enabled are implemented entirely via direct filesystem access. Other than that, systemctl uses a private socket when running as root – it talks DBus but doesn't require dbus-daemon. A bigger problem is that initramfs can't know much about the main system due to having a separate /etc, unless maybe you run `systemctl --root=...` Could you elaborate on why you find this checking necessary in the first place? Do your udev rules run some weird stuff? If you're working with your own internal services, there might be other ways of checking this. <div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 11:24 Martin Wilck <<a href="mailto:mwilck@suse.com">mwilck@suse.com</a>> wrote: </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi all, is there a way to test whether a certain service is enabled (or is going to be enabled) that would work even very early in the boot process (in our case from udev rules called in the "udev trigger" phase both in initrd and after switching root)? I tried calling "systemctl is-enabled" but it obviously depends on some services (dbus, I guess) being functional, and didn't provide reliable results during early boot for us. We finally resorted to scanning *.wants directories by ourselves, but that's of course sub-optimal (poor mans partial implementation of systemd's service enablement logic). Regards Martin -- Dr. Martin Wilck <<a href="mailto:mwilck@suse.com" target="_blank">mwilck@suse.com</a>>, Tel. +49 (0)911 74053 2107 SUSE Linux GmbH, GF: Felix Imendörffer, Jane Smithard, Graham Norton HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list <a href="mailto:systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.org" target="_blank">systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.org</a> <a href="https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel</a> </blockquote></div><div dir="ltr">-- </div><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Mantas Mikulėnas <<a href="mailto:grawity@gmail.com">grawity@gmail.com</a>> Sent from my phone </div>