Dietpi apt upgrade, created all these new users and groups!

General Discussion
1

I logged into dietpi on rpi zero 2 WH. it said to run apt upgrade, I did, and at the end of the script, i see it went and created all these new users and groups. What the heck ? Why ?

dracut: Generating /boot/initrd.img-6.18.34+rpt-rpi-v8
Creating group 'tty' with GID 5.
Creating group 'disk' with GID 6.
Creating group 'man' with GID 12.
Creating group 'kmem' with GID 15.
Creating group 'dialout' with GID 20.
Creating group 'fax' with GID 21.
Creating group 'voice' with GID 22.
Creating group 'cdrom' with GID 24.
Creating group 'floppy' with GID 25.
Creating group 'tape' with GID 26.
Creating group 'sudo' with GID 27.
Creating group 'audio' with GID 29.
Creating group 'dip' with GID 30.
Creating group 'operator' with GID 37.
Creating group 'src' with GID 40.
Creating group 'shadow' with GID 42.
Creating group 'video' with GID 44.
Creating group 'sasl' with GID 45.
Creating group 'plugdev' with GID 46.
Creating group 'staff' with GID 50.
Creating group 'games' with GID 60.
Creating group 'users' with GID 100.
Creating group 'nogroup' with GID 65534.
Creating group 'systemd-journal' with GID 999.
Creating user 'root' (n/a) with UID 0 and GID 0.
Creating group 'daemon' with GID 1.
Creating user 'daemon' (n/a) with UID 1 and GID 1.
Creating group 'bin' with GID 2.
Creating user 'bin' (n/a) with UID 2 and GID 2.
Creating group 'sys' with GID 3.
Creating user 'sys' (n/a) with UID 3 and GID 3.
Creating user 'sync' (n/a) with UID 4 and GID 65534.
Creating user 'games' (n/a) with UID 5 and GID 60.
Creating user 'man' (n/a) with UID 6 and GID 12.
Creating group 'lp' with GID 7.
Creating user 'lp' (n/a) with UID 7 and GID 7.
Creating group 'mail' with GID 8.
Creating user 'mail' (n/a) with UID 8 and GID 8.
Creating group 'news' with GID 9.
Creating user 'news' (n/a) with UID 9 and GID 9.
Creating group 'uucp' with GID 10.
Creating user 'uucp' (n/a) with UID 10 and GID 10.
Creating group 'proxy' with GID 13.
Creating user 'proxy' (n/a) with UID 13 and GID 13.
Creating group 'www-data' with GID 33.
Creating user 'www-data' (n/a) with UID 33 and GID 33.
Creating group 'backup' with GID 34.
Creating user 'backup' (n/a) with UID 34 and GID 34.
Creating group 'list' with GID 38.
Creating user 'list' (n/a) with UID 38 and GID 38.
Creating group 'irc' with GID 39.
Creating user 'irc' (n/a) with UID 39 and GID 39.
Creating user '_apt' (n/a) with UID 42 and GID 65534.
Creating user 'nobody' (n/a) with UID 65534 and GID 65534.
'/boot/initrd.img-6.18.34+rpt-rpi-v8' -> '/boot/firmware/initramfs8'
root@DietPi:~#
2

This package is not maintained nor managed by DietPi. It’s an original package from RPi. These are all global system groups. Not sure why they are generated now. Maybe @MichaIng knows.

3

ut oh. then why did dietpi recommend to do the upgrade? Do i have something set wrong in my apt sources? is there a cmd i can run to set my apt sources to only apply updates from dietpi? thank you.

4

These are all common system users and groups, present on all Debian systems. I saw this when switching from initramfs-tools to dracut (the new default initramfs implementation). As this output is generated while the initamfs image is built, I am sure these are created within the initramfs image, not on the host system.

EDIT: What is actually bad is, that the initramfs image is generated at all. There should be SKIP_INITRAMFS_GEN=yes in /etc/default/raspi-firmware, which should set INITRD=No in the package maintainer script, which should cause the initramfs build to be skipped.

@stevech which Debian version do you use? EDIT: Seems to be Trixie. I think I saw this on one of my RPis as well, but missed to investigate.

And you are on latest DietPi version?

If you do not explicitly require the initramfs, you could run this script:

# Raspberry Pi with new kernel stack
if (( $G_HW_MODEL < 10 )) && dpkg-query -s 'raspi-firmware' 2> /dev/null | grep -q '^Status: install ok installed$' &&
	! grep -q '^[[:blank:]]*auto_initramfs=' /boot/firmware/config.txt &&
	! grep -q '^[[:blank:]]*initramfs[[:blank:]]' /boot/firmware/config.txt
then
	G_DIETPI-NOTIFY 2 'Disabling initramfs generation, since it is not explicitly enabled in config.txt'
	G_CONFIG_INJECT 'SKIP_INITRAMFS_GEN=' 'SKIP_INITRAMFS_GEN=yes' /etc/default/raspi-firmware
	G_EXEC rm -f /boot/initrd.img-* /boot/firmware/initramfs*
fi

So if the config.txt does not make explicit use of an initramfs, it is assured to be disabled in /etc/default/raspi-firmware, and existing images removed. Hopefully, the RPi kernel upgrades will respect that from now on.