On 14/10/14 16:48, Steve Litt wrote:
So are you saying I could use sysvinit or nosh as my PID1, drop in libpam-systemd and no other systemd components, and have all PAM functionalities run properly?
Thank you for the clarification.The short and vague answer is "no"; PAM modules that depend on external programs for correct operation don't run properly if those programs aren't present. (pam_systemd is not the only such module that is part of Debian.)
For a longer and more accurate answer, I refer to the pam_systemd(8) man page:
If the system was not booted up with systemd as init system, this
module does nothing and immediately returns PAM_SUCCESS.
It appears, then, that the answer is that your other PAM modules will
not be prevented from running properly, while the pam_systemd module's
behaviour will be reduced to a no-op returning PAM_SUCCESS, presumably
meaning that it won't cause any PAM failures but that programs which
expect it to have done something useful will probably not work correctly.