[kwlug-disc] Degraded systems (all of mine, yours too (probably))

[Thomas McKee]

On Sun, Apr 5, 2026 at 12:48 PM Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> I wouldn't be too concerned about it, except that it delays the booting of
> this machine by a few minutes.
>
Presumably, that would mean the "default" systemd target (or, perhaps
whichever target you'd need to login ... like a display manager or sshd
service) depends on the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service unit. The
dependency may be direct but is most likely a transitive dependency. My
systemd-fu is weak but, at least on my machine, I can get a listing of all
the systemd units that will delay my startup with

systemctl list-dependencies `systemctl get-default`

I can't glean much from the unit file itself.
>
> The highlighted parts contain ids of the network interfaces.
> Only one is actually used, and it runs fine.
> No idea why it says "degraded" for both.
>
IIUC, the "degraded" part is the criteria for the
`systemd-networkd-wait-online` command to consider the interface "online".
"degraded" is defined in the `networkctl` man page but I don't understand
enough networking gobbledygook to help interpret it. 😅

degraded
             The link has carrier and addresses valid on the local  link
 configured.
             For  bond  or bridge master this means that not all slave
network inter‐
             faces have carrier but at least one does.


> Can anyone shed more light on this?
> Should I just disable that unit file?
>
 It probably makes sense for some kinds of systemd units to wait for the
network before they startup (automatic update downloaders come to mind) so
disabling it entirely might cause headaches elsewhere. I'd look to see if I
could decouple the units I care about from blocking on the network-online
unit but which units to adjust is probably specific to your distro,
configuration and tastes.

HTH,
- Tom
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