If for any reason something goes wrong during the boot process (most likely due
to a network issue), system admins should be allowed to log in to the system to
debug the problem. However due to the login session barrier enforced by
systemd-user-sessions.service for all users, logins for root will be delayed
until a (dbus) timeout expires. Beside being confusing, it's not a nice user
experience to wait for an indefinite period of time (no message is shown) this
and also suggests that something went wrong in the background.
The reason of this delay is due to the fact that all units involved in the
creation of a user session are ordered after systemd-user-sessions.service,
which is subject to network issues. If root needs to log in at that time,
logind is requested to create a new session (via pam_systemd), which ultimately
ends up waiting for systemd-user-session.service to be activated. This has the
bad side effect to block login for root until the dbus call done by pam_systemd
times out and the PAM stack proceeds anyways.
To solve this problem, this patch orders the session scope units and the user
instances only after systemd-user-sessions.service for unprivileged users only.
This removes the UserTasksMax= setting in logind.conf. Instead, the generic
TasksMax= setting on the slice should be used. Instead of a transient unit we
use a drop-in to tweak the default definition of a .slice. It's better to use
the normal unit mechanisms instead of creating units on the fly. This will also
make it easier to start user@.service independently of logind, or set
additional settings like MemoryMax= for user slices.
The setting in logind is removed, because otherwise we would have two sources
of "truth": the slice on disk and the logind config. Instead of trying to
coordinate those two sources of configuration (and maintainer overrides to
both), let's just convert to the new one fully.
Right now now automatic transition mechanism is provided. logind will emit a
hint when it encounters the setting, but otherwise it will be ignored.
Fixes#2556.
