NixOS-WSL breaks every time I restart my PC

[brady444]

Bug description

Same issue as in #847, but now happens every time I restart my PC.

After a while, wsl gives this error: "wsl: Failed to start the systemd user session for 'brady'. See journalctl for more details."

I am using this workaround currently to re-activate my NixOS configuration which fixes it temporarily:

wsl --user root --exec bash

export PATH="/nix/var/nix/profiles/system-284-link/sw/bin:${PATH}"
/nix/var/nix/profiles/system-284-link/activate

# Wait a bit, then Ctrl-C

su -l brady

rebuild # This is my custom shell function that runs `nixos-rebuild`

Let me know if you want any logs/any system info. Last time, I didn't find anything in journalctl. No idea what's going on here. Maybe Windows shuts down wsl improperly?

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Restart PC
2. Try to launch wsl

Logs

N/A

WSL version

WSL version: 2.6.1.0
Kernel version: 6.6.87.2-1
WSLg version: 1.0.66
MSRDC version: 1.2.6353
Direct3D version: 1.611.1-81528511
DXCore version: 10.0.26100.1-240331-1435.ge-release
Windows version: 10.0.26200.7171

[Etmix]

I have the same problem. Thank you for the workaround for now!
journalctl doesn't contain any entries. dmesg complains that the system was started witout systemd.

[Etmix]

@brady444
I was able to fix it:
The issue was agenix for me. I've been using agenix for a long time with ssh keys without password. I recently decided to protect all my keys with passwords and that worked fine and on "nixos-rebuild switch" agenix prompted for the password. After restarting though, agenix hang on decrypting the secrets and prevented systemd from starting.
I was able to fix it by regaining access with your workaround and removing the password. WSL now restarts without issue.

[brady444]

@Etmix Weird, I don't think I'm doing anything like that in my config. But I'm glad your issue is resolved.

[brady444]

Got some help from Gemini, I think this command might have fixed it for now: sudo ln -s /run/current-system/sw/bin/systemctl /usr/bin/systemctl

It says that WSL has the /usr/bin/systemctl path hardcoded. But it looks like the latest WSL release fixed that (https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/2.6.1), so I'm not sure what's going on

[brady444]

This issue might be related microsoft/WSL#13186

[brady444]

Nevermind, even with the symlink I'm still getting the error.

[brady444]

Related issue #888

[brady444]

Update: this now happens every time I restart WSL. I changed some things and now the workaround I posted above isn't needed. I am eventually put onto my login shell. But WSL takes forever to start and I still get the systemd error.

[nzbr]

There was an update to WSL recently. Does installing that fix it?

[brady444]

@nzbr Still happening on latest WSL version:

WSL version: 2.6.2.0
Kernel version: 6.6.87.2-1
WSLg version: 1.0.71
MSRDC version: 1.2.6353
Direct3D version: 1.611.1-81528511
DXCore version: 10.0.26100.1-240331-1435.ge-release
Windows version: 10.0.26200.7171

[nzbr]

I am not able to reproduce the problem on my end right now . Are you starting any other distro before NixOS? If so, this might actually just be a duplicate of #888.
Either way, do you have your config available somewhere? If so, I could try to reproduce the bug with that

[brady444]

No, I only have NixOS installed

[brady444]

@nzbr Here is my config.

I just did a rebuild and reproduced the issue again:

C:\Users\brady>wsl --shutdown

C:\Users\brady>wsl
wsl: Failed to start the systemd user session for 'brady'. See journalctl for more details.
brady /mnt/c/Users/brady >