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viktordick

Member

Registered: 2012-03-19

Posts: 16

[SOLVED] How to tell systemd to start decrypting as early as possible?

Hello there,
now that gnome got updated to 3.6 I had to finally convert to systemd. My system is encrypted and some of the data (for example my music collection) is on another hard disk which is also encrypted, although it cat be opened with a key file that is located in my root filesystem (so I only have to type in the keyphrase for my root at boot).

When I tried to use systemd a few weeks ago, this was a problem. According to the wiki-article, I had two possibilities:
1) simply have the appropriate entries in /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab. This is problematic since then it has to be completely mounted for fs-local.service (or something like that) to be available, so for example gdm gets started rather late.
2) add x-systemd-automount to the mount options. Gdm is then started earlier, but my music program (listen) takes a long time to start, since the unlock and mount only gets started as soon as it is accessed. Also, gdm seems to take a long time to start, so I suspect that it is also trying to access something and gets blocked.

In general, I like the idea that any access to the file system is blocked until it is ready - this prevents listen from going through my playlist thinking that everything is deleted. But I'd like to tell systemd to start the unlocking as soon as it is started - maybe even before the root filesystem is remounted, since this only needs read access to /. At the moment I have a script in /etc/rc.d that does the unlocking, checking, and unlocking. This is usually finished before listen starts, but if the partition needs checking this will not be the case. Has anyone understood systemd good enough to have a suggestion?

Last edited by viktordick (2014-11-06 12:46:27)

tomegun

Developer

From: France

Registered: 2010-05-28

Posts: 661

Re: [SOLVED] How to tell systemd to start decrypting as early as possible?

I do something similar with my /home partition:

LABEL=HOME              /home           ext4    x-systemd-automount               0       2

Notice that I do not use the "noauto" option. This means that systemd will mount the partition as early as possible, but it will not wait for it to finish mounting (merely buffer any accesses using automount).

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] How to tell systemd to start decrypting as early as possible?

Just to be sure, isn't it x-systemd.automount and not x-systemd-automount?  (Where it is a . and not a - )