Re: [OE-core][PATCH V5 1/3] base-passwd: add clock group

[ChenQi <Qi.Chen@windriver.com>]

On 10/31/25 13:54, Alexander Kanavin wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Oct 2025 at 04:05, Chen Qi via lists.openembedded.org
> <Qi.Chen=windriver.com@lists.openembedded.org> wrote:
>> New systemd version (v258) introduces a new group, clock, to
>> "enable applications like linuxptp to open clocks without root
>> privileges".[1]
>>
>> This results in warning at do_rootfs time:
>> WARNING: Group clock has never been defined
>>
>> Add group clock with gid 81 to fix this issue. The wheel group's
>> gid is 80, so 81 is chosen.
>>
>> Note that Debian rejects this patch because they're using sysusers
>> to handle such groups, including 'clock', 'kvm', 'sgx', etc. We're
>> not relying on sysusers, so we have to add a patch here.
> The question I had was why can't this be done in systemd recipe,
> similar to what weston recipe does:
>
> GROUPADD_PARAM:${PN} = "--system weston-launch"
>
> Alex

Hi Alex,

IMHO, there are two reasons.

1) It will result in other recipes using this group have a dependency on 
systemd recipe. This might not be a problem for clock group now, because 
it was newly introduced. But such dependency is really unneeded. It's 
possible that they use sysvinit and they can still use this group.

2) It's better we handle such groups (sgx, wheel, kvm, clock) in a 
consistent manner. We either change them all, or we keep the status quo. 
I mean, if we use sysusers mechanism or change useradd.bbclass to have 
similar behavior with sysusers, it's possible that we can remove these 
groups from base-passwd. Because in this way, there will be no 
unnecessary extra inter-recipe dependencies.

In summary, for a group that might be needed by multiple recipes that do 
not necessarily have dependency relationships, we can only put it on 
base-passwd for now. If we re-design and re-implement useradd.bbclass, 
we might be able to avoid this.

Regards,
Qi