Should we wait a couple days to do our next update or is this just for new installs of xenial? <div class="gmail_quote">On Oct 29, 2015 9:43 AM, "Martin Pitt" <<a href="mailto:martin.pitt@ubuntu.com">martin.pitt@ubuntu.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hello all, /etc/mtab is supposed to be a symlink to /proc/self/mounts (or /proc/mounts) for stuff to work. We've also shipped "debian-fixup.service" since vivid to turn a file into a symlink on boot. However, if you have /etc/mtab as a file (e. g. right after installation), current xenial's systemd will fail hard to boot with something like | systemd [1]: /etc/mtab is not a symlink or not pointing to /proc/self/mounts. This is not supported anymore. Please replace /etc/mtab with a symlink to /proc/self/mounts. | systemd [1]: Freezing execution. This is of course a really harsh failure mode, and it will be changed again in a few weeks or so to merely warn about that. But as these warnings have existed for a long time already, and nobody notices them, having this hard failure mode will actually tell us which places we need to fix. E. g. a week ago debian-installer was fixed [1], and I just heared on IRC that a Xubuntu desktop install fails as well; bug was just filed [2]. We really must stop writing /etc/mtab files. It breaks libmount's monitoring and all kinds of old school software which still reads /etc/mtab directly; ideally they should of course be fixed to look into /proc, and /etc/mtab should just die, but there's still some way to go (e. g. [3]). So for now, if you see a boot failure like this, please report it and ping me, so that we can fix our installers, images etc. to not produce a broken /etc/mtab any more. After that, just remove /etc/mtab (e. g. temporarily boot with upstart) to resume. After we fixed our installers (ubiquity, d-i, cloud-init, etc.), we'll go back to warning (IOW: ignore) mode. Thanks, Martin [1] <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=802187" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=802187</a> [2] <a href="https://launchpad.net/bugs/1511376" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://launchpad.net/bugs/1511376</a> [3] <a href="https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19108" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19108</a> -- Martin Pitt | <a href="http://www.piware.de" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.piware.de</a> Ubuntu Developer (<a href="http://www.ubuntu.com" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">www.ubuntu.com</a>) | Debian Developer (<a href="http://www.debian.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">www.debian.org</a>) -- ubuntu-devel mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel</a> </blockquote></div>