ndctl and cxl can be used on its own, installation of them should not
imply one wants to run ndctl-monitor (or as I see in version 77 also
cxl-monitor).

Move systemd service units and init scripts to own packages,
ndctl-monitor and cxl-monitor?

Thanks.

That's a reasonable request.  However, I wonder, how intrusive the daemon
is?  If there are no failures, it just sits there doing nothing, not taking
any significant amount of memory.  It's same as eg. smartmontools.
If the daemon is still unwanted, it can be disabled via update-rc.d or
systemd equivalent.

Splitting the two daemons away would make sense for packages that run on
resource-constrained systems, but machines that have pmem are very, very far
from that :)

Thus: could you tell me if your use case would suffer if you had to manually
disable the daemons from starting?


Meow!

Cześć Adamie.

I often use a custom livecd verision of Debian with various utilities
pre-installed, so they can be easily used offline, or without needing to
reinstall them after each reboot.

Among many other utilities I do have cxl and nvm dimm tools.

But often, if I boot this same livecd on a machine that does not have cxl
or nvm dimm devices, deamon will complain, and fail at boot (with big red
warning), and sytemd will continue restarting it afaik (or maybe not, it
looks like it tries to run it only once on my system, then gives up).

root@debian:~# systemctl status ndctl-monitor.service
× ndctl-monitor.service - Ndctl Monitor Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/ndctl-monitor.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Wed 2023-06-28 22:11:35 UTC; 25min ago
   Duration: 89ms
    Process: 2412 ExecStart=/usr/bin/ndctl monitor (code=exited, status=250)
   Main PID: 2412 (code=exited, status=250)
        CPU: 9ms

Jun 28 22:11:35 debian systemd[1]: Started ndctl-monitor.service - Ndctl Monitor Daemon.
Jun 28 22:11:35 debian ndctl[2412]: no dimms to monitor, exiting
Jun 28 22:11:35 debian systemd[1]: ndctl-monitor.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=250/n/a
Jun 28 22:11:35 debian systemd[1]: ndctl-monitor.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.


It is not a big deal, but something that is not perfect in my opinion.

For my livecd, I can clearly modify some systemd unit files manually
(using build scripts for live-build), but I wonder if defaulting to
running a daemon by default is a good idea in general. Most of the time
probably yes, but sometimes not.

As of smartmontools you mentioned. I have exactly same issue. I need
smartctl tools for troubleshooting various computers on my livecd, but I
DO NOT WANT smartd to start. For very similar reason I opened a bug
against smartmontools few days ago: https://bugs.debian.org/1039454


Feel free to downgrade to wishlist and think if this makes sense at all.

Cheers,
Witold