System adminsitrator Chris Siebenmann has found Modern versions of systemd can cause an unmount storm during shutdowns:
One of my discoveries about Ubuntu 20.04 is that my test machine can trigger the kernel's out of memory killing during shutdown. My test virtual machine has 4 GB of RAM and 1 GB of swap, but it also has 347 NFS[*] mounts, and after some investigation, what appears to be happening is that in the 20.04 version of systemd (systemd 245 plus whatever changes Ubuntu has made), systemd now seems to try to run umount for all of those filesystems all at once (which also starts a umount.nfs process for each one). On 20.04, this is apparently enough to OOM[**] my test machine.
[...] Unfortunately, so far I haven't found a way to control this in systemd. There appears to be no way to set limits on how many unmounts systemd will try to do at once (or in general how many units it will try to stop at once, even if that requires running programs). Nor can we readily modify the mount units, because all of our NFS mounts are done through shell scripts by directly calling
mount; they don't exist in/etc/fstabor as actual.mountunits.
[*] NFS: Network File System
[**] OOM Out of memory.
We've been here before and there is certainly more where that came from.
Previously:
(2020) Linux Home Directory Management is About to Undergo Major Change
(2019) System Down: A systemd-journald Exploit
(2017) Savaged by Systemd
(2017) Linux systemd Gives Root Privileges to Invalid Usernames
(2016) Systemd Crashing Bug
(2015) tmux Coders Asked to Add Special Code for systemd
(2016) SystemD Mounts EFI pseudo-fs RW, Facilitates Permanently Bricking Laptops, Closes Bug Invalid
(2015) A Technical Critique of Systemd
(2014) Devuan Developers Can Be Reached Via vua@debianfork.org
(2014) Systemd-resolved Subject to Cache Poisoning
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday May 10 2020, @07:49PM
Honestly, 18.04 wasn't a great release either. I'm running it on my laptop, and while most of the bugs have been SRUed out, I have run into oddities with the included systemd and journalctl. Most of the issues appeared to come from Debian and I found 7/8 both to be very unstable compared to what came before. I've been fairly dissolution with Linux distributions for the last several years, and my only solace is that Windows continues its steady march in becoming crapper with each Windows 10 update.
Still always moving