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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
pausesystem 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 trueloop. Yay non-determinism!
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:05AM
> I will repeat - debian jessie does not have this bug. They are running an older/stable/patched version (2.15).
Good for Debian, but does the systemd project attempt to make stable releases so that all distributors who care about such things?
> Perhaps the issue with systemd is that different environments (kernel/libraries) etc has caused "bug boundaries"
I don't understand the term "bug boundaries".
> If you watched the last LP talk, there are attempts to greatly reduce this problem with the "portable" systemd interface.
I must admit, I haven't watched even one of his talks. Did you go to the systemd conference?
> [...] up 468 days 11:59, 1 user [...]
I don't suppose that one user is malicious. Is ksplice in use?