Dear Maintainer,

when updating a recently installed server, we noticed that open-vm-tools.service refused to start, reporting that the unit tmp.mount is masked.

I tracked the error down to the "RequiresMountsFor=/tmp" line in the default unit file, which causes a hard requirement on that unit being usable. In our setup there is a physical /tmp configured in fstab, which conflicts with thedefault tmp.mount unit.

I believe that changing the RequiresMountsFor to WantsMountsFor as in the supplied patch should solve the issue. It works in our setup, but I have not been able to test for any posible side-effects, such as potentially causing a regression on #900566.

Thank you for your time,
Erik
--- /lib/systemd/system/open-vm-tools.service   2025-05-12 15:17:50.000000000 +0200
+++ /etc/systemd/system/open-vm-tools.service   2025-09-08 10:43:32.558735553 +0200
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
 Before=cloud-init-local.service
 After=vgauth.service
 After=apparmor.service
-RequiresMountsFor=/tmp
+WantsMountsFor=/tmp
 After=systemd-remount-fs.service systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service systemd-modules-load.service

 [Service]

Hi,
I just upgraded all of Trixie servers to 13.2 with the same problem you
described. Many VMs were left with the CheckMK's monitoring check "ESX
Guest Tools" in CRIT state.
I can restart open-vm-tools.service with your patch now.
Thanks!