anyone up for maintaining libgtop2 so the GNOME "about this system" dialog can stop being a wasteland on ARM systems? https://community.mnt.re/t/luks-decrypt-prompt-invisible-display-off-on-boot/4600/13

@mntmn possible workaround in the meantime: make /etc/machine-info a symlink to /run/something/machine-info, generate the latter file at boot time each boot.

@wjt Yes, that would work. Do you know prior art for this? We considered auto-generating /etc/machine-info at boot time but that has the problem that it would possible overwrite what the system admin manually intended to configure in /etc/machine-info. Making it a symlink into /run is better because it signals to the admin that they should not edit the file. We can do this but I would feel better if I could reference an existing project that does that. @mntmn

@josch @mntmn not for this specific file... The thing to check first is, what do the machinectl invocations that edit the file do when it is a symlink into /run? Do they edit the (temporary) target (bad) or replace the symlink with an updated copy (good!)?

@ah Even after reading the man page of machine-id, I don't understand how setting systemd.machine_id=firmware allows me to set HARDWARE_MODEL or HARDWARE_VENDOR as i would in /etc/machine-info. Can you explain? @wjt @mntmn