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Systemd Crashing Bug

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

mechanicjay writes:

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: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @03:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @03:48AM (#410490)

    systemd developers are fucking incompetent as fuck.

    this is proof they don't know what the fuck they are doing, and focus on shiny features.

    Yeah, so putting xinetd, cron, automount, and fuck knows what else, into one fucking package, has now been proven, beyond any doubt, to be a fucking irrational idea from a fucking massively incompetent programmer, who isn't actually a linux user.

    OH NO ANON YOU ARE WRONG SYSTEMD IS MODULAR!!!

    No, it isn't, so fuck off, you fucking deceptive, lieing, cunt. Proof: systemd --user.

    Lennart and all the systemd people, dbus people, network manager people, all need to catch one plane somewhere. Pity it wasn't MH370.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @01:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @01:32PM (#412050)

    Most of them seem to have come "down" from the DE (Gnome in particular) and web dev realms, rather than "up" from the kernel realm.

    Meaning that they are unlikely to be fully aware of what unix has to offer already, but well versed in the "point and grunt" side of Windows and OSX.