Larger AWS EC2 instances with MariaDB have intermittent issues starting MariaDB at boot

[JedMeister]

It has been discovered that larger AWS EC2 instances (e.g. Medium or larger) appear to have intermittent issues starting MariaDB. Smaller instances (e.g. Micro and Small) appear to be unaffected.

The error message (via systemd) may be either:

Failed at step NAMESPACE spawning /usr/sbin/mysqld: No such file or directory

Or:

Failed at step NAMESPACE spawning /usr/sbin/mysqld: Invalid argument

(See full log output from Drupal 9 appliance below)

It appears to be a boot time race condition as manually restarting it seems to work fine. Do that like this:

systemctl start mariadb.service

Unfortunately, I haven't yet developed a fix/workaround, but I'm working on it...

---

More detailed log info:

systemd[1]: Starting MariaDB 10.3.29 database server...
systemd[702]: mariadb.service: Failed to set up mount namespacing: No such file or directory
systemd[702]: mariadb.service: Failed at step NAMESPACE spawning /usr/sbin/mysqld: No such file or directory
systemd[1]: mariadb.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=226/NAMESPACE
systemd[1]: mariadb.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
systemd[1]: Failed to start MariaDB 10.3.29 database server.

Or

systemd[1]: Starting MariaDB 10.3.29 database server...
systemd[690]: mariadb.service: Failed to set up mount namespacing: Invalid argument
systemd[690]: mariadb.service: Failed at step NAMESPACE spawning /usr/sbin/mysqld: Invalid argument
systemd[1]: mariadb.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=226/NAMESPACE
systemd[1]: mariadb.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
systemd[1]: Failed to start MariaDB 10.3.29 database server.

[JedMeister]

I have reported this upstream (with Debian): https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=991839

As noted there, a workaround is to add a 1 second sleep to at service start:

mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/mariadb.service.d/
cat > /etc/systemd/system/mariadb.service.d/override.conf <<EOF
[Service]
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/sleep 1
EOF

[JedMeister]

We should check if this is still an issue...