Getting systemd-homed working properly on Fedora Workstation

Project Discussion
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Hi Xiao.

Thank you for reaching out.
These are the steps I used to create my homed-managed user on MD RAID1 block device:

  1. I created MD RAID1 block device /dev/md0 using 2 Micron 5400 1.92TB SATA SSDs:
sudo mdadm -C /dev/md0 --level=raid1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
  1. I configured systemd-homed following this excellent tutorial - Building a new home with systemd-homed on fedora. Important part of this is to configure custom SELinux policies for systemd-homed, as Fedora’s OOTB policies still will not cover what’s required to function homed properly.
  2. Next, I created my homed-managed user:
sudo homectl create <my user name> --storage=luks --disk-size=500G --fs-type=ext4 --luks-extra-mount-options=defcontext=system_u:object_r:user_home_dir_t:s0 -G wheel --real-name="<real name of my user>" --image-path=/dev/md0
  1. I rebooted and tried to log in to my new user. GUI login timed out. I found out that the discard took 6-8 minutes to complete by trying to activate my new user via homectl CLI while I’m logged in as old user and analyzing system log.
  2. My next attempt was to turn discard off:
sudo homectl update <my user name> --luks-offline-discard=0
sudo homectl update <my user name> --luks-discard=0
  1. Now I could log in normally. But I didn’t like that I had to disable discard.

Please let me know If you need anything else.
Note - I had to drop the idea of using homed-managed user this time and I converted my normal user home dir to simple “home on MD RAID1” without the systemd-homed until homed implementation gets more mature.