Bug#922647: systemd --user no longer running

Julien Leproust julien+bts at kwet.org
Wed Mar 6 20:54:21 GMT 2019


Hi,

I've been hit by seemingly the same bug on two of my machines.

Since about mid-February, I noticed that my two Debian sid desktops no 
longer produced any sound. On one of them, I use lightdm+mate, on the 
other I use lightdm+kodi. Both were updated roughly weekly, with only 
official sid repositories.

I quickly found out that the sound was broken because pulseaudio was not 
starting, having no permission to access the sound devices. In turn, I 
found that this permission should have been granted through dbus and 
systemd --user, which were both absent from the process list.

Same symptoms for both machine:
$ systemctl --user status
Failed to read server status: Process org.freedesktop.systemd1 exited 
with status 1

Last systemd user logs were from a boot mid-january when sound still 
worked. Absolutely no logs since then, just like for Eduard (I tried all 
the suggestions above).

systemd --user does not start at all from the user session.

loginctl shows only the lightdm session, not the real user one:

$ loginctl
SESSION UID USER    SEAT  TTY
      c3 135 lightdm seat0

I have the same systemd error as Eduard when starting it manually:

$ systemd --user
Trying to run as user instance, but $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set.

XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and XDG_SESSION_ID are both unset in my environment.

$ env|grep XDG
XDG_SEAT_PATH=/org/freedesktop/DisplayManager/Seat0
XDG_VTNR=7
XDG_GREETER_DATA_DIR=/var/lib/lightdm/data/julien
XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=mate
XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/mate:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=MATE
XDG_SEAT=seat0
XDG_SESSION_PATH=/org/freedesktop/DisplayManager/Session0

I tried logging in as a brand new user with an empty home directory, the 
problem is reproduced.

I tried replacing lightdm with sddm, and mate-session with cinnamon or 
gnome, all fail the same way.

I tried installing a brand new VM with lightdm and mate-session, 
everything works fine.

I can notice a difference with dbus though. On my broken machine:
$ env|grep DBUS
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-UqLtmoksoq,guid=ffcd65719a7135c063ccc9a15c6f26c9

On my working VM:
env|grep DBUS
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus

I can see a related change in systemd 241:
* $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable is set by pam_systemd
again.

/run/user/1000 does not exist on my broken machine. On the working 
machine, XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is /run/user/1000 and exists and is populated.

On one of my broken machines, /run/user is empty, and on the other it 
only contains an entry for the lightdm user:
$ ls -al /run/user/135
ls: cannot access '/run/user/135/gvfs': Permission denied
total 0
drwx------ 8 lightdm lightdm 180 Feb 26 19:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 root    root     60 Feb 26 19:52 ../
srw-rw-rw- 1 lightdm lightdm   0 Feb 26 19:52 bus=
drwx------ 3 lightdm lightdm  60 Feb 26 19:52 dbus-1/
drwx------ 2 lightdm lightdm  60 Feb 26 19:52 dconf/
drwx------ 2 lightdm lightdm 140 Feb 26 19:52 gnupg/
d????????? ? ?       ?         ?            ? gvfs/
drwxr-xr-x 2 lightdm lightdm  60 Feb 26 19:52 pulse/
drwxr-xr-x 2 lightdm lightdm  80 Feb 26 19:52 systemd/

Is there anything else I can check in this direction?

I guess the problem must come from some system configuration on both of 
my machines, maybe some old file in /etc. debsums -ce shows only 
modifications to files from completely unrelated packages (libvirt, grub).

My next idea would be to try to purge and reinstall most systemd 
packages, but it will be tricky on a live system.

Does anyone have any other idea to test short of reinstalling?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best regards

-- 
Julien Leproust



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