Source: systemd Version: 215-17+deb8u2 Hi Martin, Michael and other systemd folks,
in another attempt at exploring systemd, I noticed that you can install a base system with systemd without installing kmod. This is useful for minimizing an installation when your kernel does not support module loading. It is also useful when systemd's own module loading capabilities via libkmod are sufficient. When doing so however, kmod-static-nodes.service loudly fails finding kmod. I argue that this is a bug in the systemd packaging. Either that service is optional. In this case it should gain a ConditionPathExists. Or it is required for running the system. In which case systemd should gain a runtime dependency on kmod. In the former scenario recommending kmod still looks like a good idea to me. In my embedded use case, the service actually creates an empty /run/tmpfiles.d/kmod.conf and is thus not necessary for proper operation. Thus I have a slight preference for the former solution. At the same time I understand that the latter is easier to support. I am reporting this bug against the jessie version, because I discovered it there, but it applies to the unstable version as well. I do not think this is worth fixing in jessie as it is a corner case and has trivial workarounds. Helmut PS: For better serving the embedded, it would be nice if systemd could provide a smaller installation size (i.e. making more components optional). I understand splitting that systemd in more packages and making some of them optional is considerable amount of work and I have little suggestions on how to do that, but maybe you have. Maybe logind or the some of the dbus support (as dbus is already optional) could be moved somewhere else? Of course the default installation should keep these components.