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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 VLM on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:52PM
linux has taken over the embedded world
How long will that last in a world of Gnome boot-loading windows architecture?
Look smaller. I have an olimex dev board on my desk at home to play with, its just an overgrown pic32, and in my infinite spare time I'm going to retro-BSD it. The point being that embedded as in "I velcro'd mah tablet onto mah refrigerator" is going all linux-y but coming up from the bottom the low performance PIC in your next toaster might very well be running *BSD.
I mean if you want a unix like internet grade OS, thats not linux anymore, but the good news is even lower end microcontrollers are getting powerful enough to run real unix, and a real unix is probably a good OS for "internet of crappy things" and all those buzzwords. You want something that works in a toaster, not something that finally solves automounting floppy disks on gnome desktop (in 2016) at enormous reliability and security cost.