tmpfiles: introduce the concept of unsafe operations

Various operations done by systemd-tmpfiles may only be safely done at
boot (e.g. removal of X lockfiles in /tmp, creation of /run/nologin).
Other operations may be done at any point in time (e.g. setting the
ownership on /{run,var}/log/journal). This distinction is largely
orthogonal to the type of operation.

A new switch --unsafe is added, and operations which should only be
executed during bootup are marked with an exclamation mark in the
configuration files. systemd-tmpfiles.service is modified to use this
switch, and guards are added so it is hard to re-start it by mistake.

If we install a new version of systemd, we actually want to enforce
some changes to tmpfiles configuration immediately. This should now be
possible to do safely, so distribution packages can be modified to
execute the "safe" subset at package installation time.

/run/nologin creation is split out into a separate service, to make it
easy to override.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1043212
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1045849

1 files changed, 25 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/man/tmpfiles.d.xml b/man/tmpfiles.d.xml
index 331fd1b472..0da52aedad 100644
--- a/man/tmpfiles.d.xml
+++ b/man/tmpfiles.d.xml
@@ -113,6 +113,9 @@ L    /tmp/foobar -    -    -    -   /dev/null</programlisting>
                 <refsect2>
                         <title>Type</title>
 
+                        <para>The type consists of a single letter and
+                        optionally an exclamation mark.</para>
+
                         <para>The following line types are understood:</para>
 
                         <variablelist>
@@ -262,6 +265,28 @@ L    /tmp/foobar -    -    -    -   /dev/null</programlisting>
                                         names.</para></listitem>
                                 </varlistentry>
                         </variablelist>
+
+                        <para>If the exclamation mark is used, this
+                        line is only safe of execute during boot, and
+                        can break a running system. Lines without the
+                        exclamation mark are presumed to be safe to
+                        execute at any time, e.g. on package upgrades.
+                        <command>systemd-tmpfiles</command> will
+                        execute line with an exclamation mark only if
+                        option <option>--unsafe</option> is given.
+                        </para>
+
+                        <para>For example:
+                        <programlisting>
+# Make sure these are created by default so that nobody else can
+d /tmp/.X11-unix 1777 root root 10d
+
+# Unlink the X11 lock files
+r! /tmp/.X[0-9]*-lock
+                        </programlisting>
+                        The second line in contrast to the first one
+                        would break a running system, and will only be
+                        executed with <option>--unsafe</option>.</para>
                 </refsect2>
 
                 <refsect2>