Re: [oe-core][PATCH] systemd: fix unmerged-bin tainted message

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, 2026-04-08 at 14:50 -0500, Randolph Sapp via lists.openembedded.org wrote:
> From: Randolph Sapp <rs@ti.com>
> 
> Systemd prefers both /bin and /sbin to link to /usr/bin. If this is not
> the case it reports that the system is tainted in systemctl status.
> 
> Add a link from /usr/sbin to /usr/bin to prevent anything from being
> excluded from the merged bin directory. This mimics the current merged
> bin directory structure of Arch Linux [1].
> 
> Update the systemd recipe to prevent creating a duplicate link when
> sbinmerge is enabled.
> 
> This check was added to systemd back in 2024 [2].
> 
> [1] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/filesystem/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD
> [2] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/844863c61e7b501097da84a1e4d1e4a6aa6d9f0d
> 
> Signed-off-by: Randolph Sapp <rs@ti.com>
> ---
> 
> I feel like this is overloading the "usrmerge" distro feature somewhat. On the
> other hand, this parameter was added for systemd support, and systemd considers
> all of this to result in an unmerged-bin warning. I figure it's kind of fine.
> 
> Open to opinions here, as we could also just add a "sbinmerge" distro feature.
> Then again, what would be the expected behavior when usrmerge is disabled? Would
> /usr/sbin just point to /usr/bin and /sbin to /bin then?

These are good questions. It feels like systemd is basically dictating
how the system should be laid out at this point and we may as well put
all this on the systemd distro feature as it is getting to the point
you can't use it without doing that :/.

It feels a bit like we should drop usrmerge too and just use systemd
there too since it doesn't have any seperate policy, it is just "do
what systemd says".

Cheers,

Richard