zunzuncito

wolf

A couple of days ago I turned on hidepid=2 for the /proc mount on my desktop PC. Today I saw the systemd-userdbd service failing on bootup, and realized that it had been failing to start for a few days. Aside from the fact that there really should be a well-supported and easy way to notify administrators of failing units, this obviously needed some investigation.

systemctl status systemd-userdbd.service wasn't very helpful, but journalctl had the specific error:

[..] spawning /lib/systemd/systemd-userdbd: Read-only file system

I didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that this had to do with enabling hidepid=2. After all, why would that result in a read-only file system? Investigating a failure very early on in boot is a pain, so instead of wasting my time on that I took to GitHub issues.

As it turns out, hidepid= is just not supported at all in systemd. This doesn't seem to be pointed out anywhere, and I certainly was not aware of it before. Services can set ProtectProc=, but there doesn't seem to be a clean way of restricting /proc for unprivileged users like a global hidepid=2 did. I've removed the option for now.