How to set up bind mounts on startup correctly in the systemd world

bind-mountfstabsystemd

systemd, trying to be smart, parallelizes mounting entries of /etc/fstab. Unfortunately, this randomly messes up bind mounts:

A look at my fstab, cleaned up a bit:

$ grep -Ev 'ntfs|swap|#' /etc/fstab
UUID=3cbb59fd-ff2c-47ed-955f-e4945b5c95b6   /           ext4        rw,relatime,data=ordered    0 1
UUID=2d7b3de8-782b-4981-9db6-a4b9a6d45cac   /home/muru/devel    ext4        rw,relatime,data=ordered    0 2
UUID=38d31418-ed63-49e8-b11b-df90da4833e2   /home/muru/var  btrfs       rw,relatime,space_cache 0 0
UUID=77307ad0-35e1-439b-8fe2-07a7bb5376b2   /mnt        ext4        rw,relatime,data=ordered    0 2
/home/muru /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie/home/muru none bind 0 0
/home/muru /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie-test/home/muru none bind 0 0
/home/muru/devel /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie/home/muru/devel none bind 0 0
/home/muru/devel /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie-test/home/muru/devel none bind 0 0

And my actual mounts:

$ mount | grep ^/dev/ | grep -Ev 'fuseblk|run'
/dev/sdb1 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda1 on /mnt type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda7 on /home/muru/devel type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sdb1 on /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie/home/muru type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sdb1 on /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie-test/home/muru type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda7 on /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie-test/home/muru/devel type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda7 on /home/muru/devel type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda7 on /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie/home/muru/devel type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda7 on /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie/home/muru/devel type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda7 on /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie-test/home/muru/devel type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda7 on /home/muru/devel type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sda7 on /home/muru/devel type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
/dev/sdb8 on /home/muru/var type btrfs (rw,relatime,space_cache)
/dev/sdb8 on /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie/home/muru/var type btrfs (rw,relatime,space_cache)
/dev/sdb8 on /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie-test/home/muru/var type btrfs (rw,relatime,space_cache)

As you can see, it looks like the mounts have been done successfully. But, the effect:

$ ls -l /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie/home/
total 4.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jun 20 20:36 muru/
$ ls -l /home/muru/devel/debian/jessie/home/muru/
total 0

I think this is due to random ordering of the mounts. If that's the case, how do I ensure an order? Do I have to use something other than fstab? If that's not the case, what might have caused it?

I'm using Arch Linux.

$ systemctl --version
systemd 221
+PAM -AUDIT -SELINUX -IMA -APPARMOR +SMACK -SYSVINIT +UTMP +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +GNUTLS +ACL +XZ +LZ4 +SECCOMP +BLKID -ELFUTILS +KMOD +IDN

Best Answer

Arnout's solution worked for me but there's a little mistake in it. Bind mounts in fstab must be like this (he swapped "bind" and "none"). Cf fstab manual.

# /etc/fstab
/home/var /var none x-systemd.requires=/home,x-systemd.automount,bind 0 0

Systemd mount reference is here : https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.mount.html

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