Bug#977826: Failed to upload environment to systemd (gdm)

[Simon McVittie]

Control: severity -1 minor

On Mon, 21 Dec 2020 at 14:58:48 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> looking through the journal, I see the following warning messages:
> 
> Dez 21 14:35:06 debian gnome-session[544]: gnome-session-binary[544]: WARNING: Failed to upload environment to systemd: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Name "org.freedesktop.systemd>
> Dez 21 14:35:06 debian gnome-session-binary[544]: WARNING: Failed to upload environment to systemd: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Name "org.freedesktop.systemd1" does not exist
> Dez 21 14:35:06 debian gnome-session[544]: gnome-session-binary[544]: WARNING: Failed to reset failed state of units: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Name "org.freedesktop.systemd1">
> Dez 21 14:35:06 debian gnome-session-binary[544]: WARNING: Failed to reset failed state of units: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Name "org.freedesktop.systemd1" does not exist
> Dez 21 14:35:06 debian gnome-session[544]: gnome-session-binary[544]: WARNING: Falling back to non-systemd startup procedure due to error: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Name "org.>
> Dez 21 14:35:06 debian gnome-session-binary[544]: WARNING: Falling back to non-systemd startup procedure due to error: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Name "org.freedesktop.systemd1>
> 
> Both systemd and libpam-systemd are installed and active.
> 
> Afaics, those warnings come from gnome-session that is started by gdm3.

If this is from the gdm3 greeter session, then it's likely to be harmless.
The greeter session uses a separate dbus-daemon per greeter instance,
instead of one per uid like dbus-user-session.

This is because if the system is configured in such a way that there
needs to be more than one greeter (multi-seat, and perhaps XDMCP if gdm
still supports that), each greeter needs to behave like its own little
session; and there is currently only one Debian-gdm uid (gdm doesn't ask
systemd to generate users for it dynamically, although maybe it should).

In older versions of gdm, you would have seen a different warning about
failure to activate /bin/false to provide the org.freedesktop.systemd1
name. Newer versions of gdm turn off autostarting in an attempt to
suppress that warning.

    smcv