About the Devuan excision [LWN.net]

About the Devuan excision

Posted Jul 1, 2026 5:31 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
In reply to: About the Devuan excision by pizza
Parent article: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

Easier to put "_netdev" in the fstab where the iSCSI volumes are mounted. Either way, a configuration bug, not a systemd one. And not Xsnow related.

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About the Devuan excision

Posted Jul 1, 2026 5:39 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

fstab? Are you a caveman? You're supposed to use mount units: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/s... And I don't believe that they support _netdev override.

Which is ironic, because /etc/fstab generator supports them.

About the Devuan excision

Posted Jul 1, 2026 6:24 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

>In general, configuring mount points through /etc/fstab is the preferred approach to manage mounts for humans.

About the Devuan excision

Posted Jul 1, 2026 9:23 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

If you're writing a mount unit, you can add the appropriate dependencies yourself; systemd-fstab-generator uses _netdev to choose a different set of After and WantedBy directives, nothing more.

About the Devuan excision

Posted Jul 1, 2026 20:18 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Not quite. systemd also has special treatment of mount units for shutdown and for containers. It's a minor thing, true, but it also reinforces my point. There are too many moving pieces in systemd that can have unexpected side-effects.

I'm not a systemd hater, and I absolutely LOVE not having to cargo-cult /etc/init.d scripts.

But I'm not at all positive about systemd's ability to carry out its stated goal: building a coherent low-level infrastructure layer. The same pattern keeps repeating again and again: systemd adds some component in an MVP fashion and then gives up on making it fit with the rest of the system before moving on to the next shiny thing. And/or takes shortcuts that shouldn't be taken.