Bug#850436: mounting var at boot: Mount point is not empty

[Daniel Pocock]

Package: systemd
Version: 215-17+deb8u5


When my system is booting, I see the following:

systemd[1]: var.mount: Directory /var to mount over is not empty,
mounting anyway.
-- Subject: Mount point is not empty
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- The directory /var is specified as the mount point (second field in
-- /etc/fstab or Where= field in systemd unit file) and is not empty.
-- This does not interfere with mounting, but the pre-exisiting files in
-- this directory become inaccessible. To see those over-mounted files,
-- please manually mount the underlying file system to a secondary
-- location.




I mounted the root filesystem a second time in a different location:

  mkdir /tmp/root-fs
  mount /dev/mapper/vg00-root /tmp/root-fs
  cd /tmp/root-fs

and looked at what exists under var:

root-fs/var
root-fs/var/lib
root-fs/var/lib/systemd
root-fs/var/lib/systemd/random-seed
root-fs/var/log
root-fs/var/log/unattended-upgrades
root-fs/var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-shutdown.log
root-fs/var/run
root-fs/var/run/avahi-daemon
root-fs/var/run/unattended-upgrades.lock

I went to single user mode, unmounted /var, removed those files and they
problem occurs again on the next boot, they are being created again.

Are any of these files important?  Do I need to change anything in the
way I mount my filesystems?

This is in /etc/fstab:

/dev/mapper/vg00-root /               ext4    errors=remount-ro,noatime
0       1

/dev/mapper/vg00-var /var            ext4    defaults        0       2