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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the love-for-lennart dept.

Security researcher and MateSSL founder, Andrew Ayer has uncovered a bug which will either crash or make systemd unstable (depending on who you talk to) on pretty much every linux distro. David Strauss posted a highly critical response to Ayer. In true pedantic nerd-fight fashion there is a bit of back and forth between them over the "true" severity of the issue and what not.

Nerd fights aside, how you feel about this bug, will probably largely depend on how you feel about systemd in general.

The following command, when run as any user, will crash systemd:

NOTIFY_SOCKET=/run/systemd/notify systemd-notify ""

After running this command, PID 1 is hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system. The system feels generally unstable (e.g. ssh and su hang for 30 seconds since systemd is now integrated with the login system). All of this can be caused by a command that's short enough to fit in a Tweet.

Edit (2016-09-28 21:34): Some people can only reproduce if they wrap the command in a while true loop. Yay non-determinism!


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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @01:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @01:36AM (#410436)

    uncovered a bug which will either crash or make systemd unstable

    You mean turning the power on? :^)

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  • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday October 05 2016, @02:05AM

    by MostCynical (2589) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @02:05AM (#410457) Journal

    Not a bug -a feature!
    Everyone knows Linux users *want* to spend hours and hours compiling and bug fixing and never showering and never leaving the basement!

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
  • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday October 05 2016, @02:34AM

    by Dunbal (3515) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @02:34AM (#410468)

    Nah, you're good. But if you let the computer run anything past the BIOS, you're on your own.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:51AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:51AM (#410516) Journal

      I think Grub is still independent of systemd.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Dunbal on Wednesday October 05 2016, @11:03AM

        by Dunbal (3515) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @11:03AM (#410542)

        For now.