Is boot.autostart's 3-value behaviour reliable?

Hello all,

according to my tests as well as this post, boot.autostart seems to have 3 possible values:

  • Unset: last state

  • True: always start

  • False: never start

However this contradicts the doc that clearly says “If set to false, restore the last state”.

I find the 3-value behavior much more sane, cause I can imagine many scenarios in which I want to fully control auto-start myself, so I explicitly want “never start” (eg managing containers via pacemaker).

My question: can we rely on this 3-value undocumented behavior? If so it would be better to update the doc.

PS. It would be also preferable to have an explicit 3rd value instead of “unset”, cause right now it’s impossible to have “false” in the default profile and override it to “unset” (I tried nullbut it didn’t work).

Yeah, the doc needs fixing as there’s definitely a different behavior between no value and false.

Can you file a bug for it? It would indeed make sense to introduce a third value of last-state to have things covered correctly.

Just filed a bug, thanks for the quick response!