Manual start of user@<uid>.service failed with permission denied

Hi,

 

I’m trying to do the following:

 

root@host:~# systemctl set-environment XDG_RUNTIME_DIR="/run/user/503"

root@host:~# systemctl start user@503.service

 

On systemd 253.4, the user can be started manually, and I can list the directory:

 

root@host:~# ls -la /run/user/503

drwx------    3 debugar  debugar         80 Dec  4 09:08 .

drwxr-xr-x    3 root     root            60 Dec  4 09:08 ..

srw-rw-rw-    1 debugar  debugar          0 Dec  4 09:08 bus

drwxr-xr-x    4 debugar  debugar        120 Dec  4 09:08 systemd

 

On last systemd v254-stable and v255-stable, I got the following instead:

 

root@host:/var/log# journalctl -xeu user@503.service

Dec 06 12:40:41 host systemd[1]: Starting User Manager for UID 503...

Dec 06 12:40:41 host systemd[7939]: Failed to copy os-release for propagation, ignoring: Permission denied

Dec 06 12:40:41 host systemd[7939]: Failed to allocate manager object: Permission denied

Dec 06 12:40:41 host systemd[1]: user@503.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE

Dec 06 12:40:41 host systemd[1]: user@503.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

Dec 06 12:40:41 host systemd[1]: Failed to start User Manager for UID 503.

 

systemd was able to create the dir /run/user/503, but got errno -13 (Permission denied) when it was trying to do mkdirat with path /run/user/503/systemd in function mkdirat_label() in file mkdir-label.c.

 

Do I need to do something else before starting user@<uid>.service or is this a bug?

 

Best regards,