Debian: Failed to restart snapd.mounts-pre.target

snapd
1

I’m using snapd on a Debian 13 Trixie server. Yesterday, an update from regular Debian repos with apt upgrade gave these messages:

Setting up snapd (2.68.3-3+b5) ...
Failed to restart snapd.mounts-pre.target: Operation refused, unit snapd.mounts-pre.target may be requested by dependency only (it is configured to refuse manual start/stop).
See system logs and 'systemctl status snapd.mounts-pre.target' for details.
Could not execute systemctl:  at /usr/bin/deb-systemd-invoke line 148.

systemctl status snapd.mounts-pre.target shows that snapd.mounts-pre.target has been running since January (when the server was created):

● snapd.mounts-pre.target - Mounting snaps
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/snapd.mounts-pre.target; static)
     Active: active since Wed 2026-01-28 14:31:48 CET; 1 month 18 days ago
 Invocation: 2c661505f2a3406493dc95f08c0be827

After the update snap list showed that snapd 2.73 was running. This morning snap list showed that snapd had been upgraded to v. 2.74.1.

My question is: should I be worried about snapd.mounts-pre.target not restarting?

2

Hello.

This is a unit we use to sequence some mount operation. Targets are not processes, they don’t consume any resources. This was added in this patch:


commit c827e52caf556cfe7e9b69ba1413395855625093
Author: Valentin David <valentin.david@canonical.com>
Date:   Mon Aug 29 10:52:12 2022 +0200

    many: use snapd.mounts targets to schedule mount units
    
    `snapd.mounts-pre.target` will be before any mount unit,
    `snapd.mounts.target`.  Now we can schedule before or after mounts
    without needing to modify the mount units.
    
    We also install those mounts to `snapd.mounts.target` so that we can
    make snapd.service for example, "want" all mounts.

The message about the debian maintainer script is somewhat harmless but also something I should fix with the next upload.

3

Sorry but I’m still confused.