MariaDB upgrade fails with "the data directory cannot reside in /home"

Symptoms

When performing a MySQL/MariaDB upgrade, an error similar to the following is shown:

"API failure: (XID 4d7uu2) The system cannot upgrade your version of MySQL or MariaDB because of at least one impediment: \nFatal: As of MariaDB 10.1.16, the data directory cannot reside in /home, /usr, /etc, /boot, or /root directories on systemd equipped systems. You must move your MariaDB data directory outside of these directories before continuing with this upgrade."

Description

MariaDB has restrictions by default with systemd to not allow running from non-standard directories. This is possible to disable with the ProtectHome=false flag in systemd. However, the upgrade is still unable to be performed. Currently,, the failure is hard-coded regardless of configuration.

We've opened an internal case for our development team to investigate this further. For reference, the case number is CPANEL-48329. Follow this article to receive an email notification when a solution is published in the product. 

Workaround

None at this time.