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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) by opinionated_science on Wednesday October 05 2016, @02:58PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @02:58PM (#410626)

    I will repeat - debian jessie does not have this bug. They are running an older/stable/patched version (2.15).

    Perhaps the issue with systemd is that different environments (kernel/libraries) etc has caused "bug boundaries"

    If you watched the last LP talk, there are attempts to greatly reduce this problem with the "portable" systemd interface.

    uptime 10:30am up 468 days 11:59, 1 user, load average: 0.43, 0.30, 0.35

    Show me a windows or Mac with uptime like that....

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @03:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @03:43PM (#410653)

    So you didn't install kernel patches for over a year?

    Anyway, such uptime should be easy to achieve (not tested): Start BIOS, set time to past, boot OS, set time to correct value (or let NTP do that).

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:05AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:05AM (#410900) Journal

    > 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?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @01:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @01:38PM (#412054)

    Linux ran stable for years even with sysv, big woop...