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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: 2, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:19AM

    by Arik (4543) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:19AM (#410513) Journal
    Neither NT nor Linux are pure types. NT started with a microkernel and over time evolved into a monolithic kernel, while Linux has done the opposite.

    And that's all completely beside the point you were replying to. He wasn't talking about a monolithic kernel necessarily. He was talking about monolithic system design. Systemd has not yet had much effect on the kernel at all, but it's still a giant monolithic pile of poo no matter what kernel it runs under.
    --
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