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posted by LaminatorX on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the fsking-pid0 dept.

A Debian user has recently discovered that systemd prevents the skipping of fsck while booting:

With init, skipping a scheduled fsck during boot was easy, you just pressed Ctrl+c, it was obvious! Today I was late for an online conference. I got home, turned on my computer, and systemd decided it was time to run fsck on my 1TB hard drive. Ok, I just skip it, right? Well, Ctrl+c does not work, ESC does not work, nothing seems to work. I Googled for an answer on my phone but nothing. So, is there a mysterious set of commands they came up with to skip an fsck or is it yet another flaw?

One user chimed in with a hack to work around the flaw, but it involved specifying an argument on the kernel command line. Another user described this so-called "fix" as being "Pretty damn inconvenient and un-discoverable", while yet another pointed out that the "fix" merely prevents "systemd from running fsck in the first place", and it "does not let you cancel a systemd-initiated boot-time fsck which is already in progress."

Further investigation showed that this is a known bug with systemd that was first reported in mid-2011, and remains unfixed as of late December 2014. At least one other user has also fallen victim to this bug.

How could a severe bug of this nature even happen in the first place? How can it remain unfixed over three years after it was first reported?

 
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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:21AM (#127875)
    Systemd fsck up.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:41AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:41AM (#127964)

      Scheize, mein Linux iss verpoetteringenend. A am seriously looking when, not if, the major distros walk away from systemd.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:35PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:35PM (#128005)
        Mein Gott. Ihr Deutsch ist schlecht! Or your English.
        • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:55PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:55PM (#128135)

          Hilfe! Hilfe! Es ist die Poetteringdämmerung! :0

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:29AM

    by tftp (806) on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:29AM (#127877) Homepage

    In 2000's I was running quite a lot of Linux, and this problem was always bothering me. It looked like the computer's needs are above user's needs. To compare, Windows never ran fsck unless the FS was in a pretty bad shape. These days I have either servers (Ubuntu LTS) that aren't frequently rebooted, or desktops (Mint) in VM that never need fsck. Maybe journaling FS help here, as integrity of the FS can be easily determined without going through terabytes of data. Running the check on a modern HDD may be an hour-long distraction, and most certainly the OS should not run it without a positive confirmation.

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:39AM

      by sjames (2882) on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:39AM (#127922) Journal

      How is it that you KNOW that no bit got flipped anywhere on the drive?

      Out of an abundance of caution, Linux wants to do a full fsck periodically. If you don't want that, you can disable the periodic fsck and do it manually when you want. Up until systemd reared it's ugly head, you had the ability to cancel the fsck if you wanted.

      • (Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:41AM

        by tftp (806) on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:41AM (#127931) Homepage

        How is it that you KNOW that no bit got flipped anywhere on the drive?

        Drives don't flip bits for no reason. Every data record (sector) has a checksum. If the sector reads OK but a bit is flipped, it's because you wrote it flipped. Don't do that.

        One of primary reasons for the need of fsck in days of ext2 was absence of the journal. This means that abrupt reset of the computer could wreck the FS. The same was the norm in days of Windows 95 (FAT). However ext3/ext4 on Linux side (not even mentioning other journaling FS) and NTFS on Windows reduced the need of full scan because everything that one needs to know for recovery is, generally, in the journal. Forcing a check of the filesystem every so many boots is just demonstrating either extreme paranoia, or lack of trust in the FS code. Perhaps back then, 15 years ago, it was a reasonable measure, considering the state of the filesystems in Linux. It is strange to encounter such a thing today. How often does a modern Windows box force you to rescan the HDD? IIRC, it happens only if an error is detected during normal operation - and then rescan is scheduled on next reboot. And yes, you can cancel it :-)

        • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:37AM

          by sjames (2882) on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:37AM (#127940) Journal

          They don't flip for no reason, they flip for a variety of reasons. Spike in vibration while writing an adjacent track, EMI in the drive cable, stray cosmic ray, power glitches, etc.

          In SOME of those cases the checksum doesn't match, but you won't know that unless something like a full fsck comes along and detects it for you. In others, the checksum will have been generated AFTER the data got corrupted and so it will perfectly validate the incorrect metadata. Fsck can sanity check that for you.

          Journaling in the file system is a great advancement, but it isn't a panacea. Paranoid? Perhaps, but we're talking about servers, not glorified solitaire and minesweeper machines :-)

          But Linux does respect user choice. You can use the -c and -i options of tune2fs to change the fsck interval or disable periodic fsck entirely. As long as you avoid systemd you can cancel an fsck if it's not a good time. You can manually command it to do the fsck and reset the countdown.

          • (Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:55AM

            by tftp (806) on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:55AM (#127943) Homepage

            Paranoid? Perhaps, but we're talking about servers, not glorified solitaire and minesweeper machines :-)

            I agree about servers; but I recall that the darned thing activated when I powered up the laptop at a meeting :-) Don't even remember what it was, SUSE or RedHat.

            In others, the checksum will have been generated AFTER the data got corrupted and so it will perfectly validate the incorrect metadata.

            Checksums are calculated and checked by the hardware. The data rate is way too high to do it in a CPU. Besides, it has to be done atomically, on sector level, when HDD rewrites a sector. But sure, there is always a possibility to screw things up. It may be reasonable to be extra careful on servers. However desktops are just fine with lazy verification.

            • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:17AM

              by sjames (2882) on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:17AM (#127973) Journal

              I agree about servers; but I recall that the darned thing activated when I powered up the laptop at a meeting :-) Don't even remember what it was, SUSE or RedHat.

              An excellent example of why fsck might need to be cancelled.

              You know which use case best applies to your machine, so you must configure it if you want lazy verification.

        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:45AM

          by Immerman (3985) on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:45AM (#127941)

          >Drives don't flip bits for no reason.

          Of course they do - hence the name "random error". Back in the day you could expect an error on average in one bit out of every 10^14 bits read. Roughly one byte in in 10 terabytes - not so bad when in the day when that was a a ferocious amount of data transfer for a 100MB drive at 50mb/s. Today though, it probably rears it's head a few times in the lifetime of a 1TB drive. And that's traditional, simple, crude even HD technology. Newer tech... well a lot o it hasn't even been out long enough to determine realistic real-world error rates. To say nothing of SSDs - where I just found numbers in the 1 in 10^8 range. That's 1 bit in every 100MB, or one error every few seconds if you're saturating the SATA bus. Seems ridiculous to me, so presumably there's a lot of error correction going on behind the scenes, but even that has it's limits.

          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:44AM

            by sjames (2882) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:44AM (#127952) Journal

            A simple read error is not a big deal except sometimes for performance, just read again until the checksum verifies the data. Often that happens at the hardware level. Write errors or bit flipping on the media IS a big deal since that is actually corrupt data. Worst of all is when the flipped bit happens prior to checksumming. That can cause silent corruption.

            That's why BTRFS and ZFS do checksumming at the file system level and support raid-like storage. Unlike a device level RAID, they can decide which disk has the correct data in cases of bit flip and can then re-write the correct data to the other drive. Even on a single drive, btrfs likes to write two copies of the metadata.

          • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:44AM

            by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:44AM (#127965) Homepage
            1TB is ~10^13 bits. A 10^-14 error will happen every tenth time you do a full backup. If hard disks get much larger they're going to have to start incorporating much fancier error detection/correction.
            --
            Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
          • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday December 25 2014, @08:33AM

            by cafebabe (894) on Thursday December 25 2014, @08:33AM (#129060) Journal

            A similar problem occurs with networking. For a few packets over a few segments, 16 bit checksums may be sufficient. However, 0.01% corruption of Jumbo Frames over 13 hops leads to silent corruption approximately once per hour. Worse links or small packets may lead to significantly higher rates of corruption.

            presumably there's a lot of error correction going on behind the scenes, but even that has it's limits.

            Unfortunately not. One person's payload is another person's header. So, if you aren't processing the payload immediately, the corruption is silent. Even if you are processing the payload immediately, corruption may elude validation or parsing.

            --
            1702845791×2
        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:27AM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:27AM (#127960) Homepage
          You appear to not consider a sector failing to read a problem.

          In that case - turn of filesystem checking completely. Good luck, and enjoy your bitrot.
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
        • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday December 25 2014, @08:31AM

          by cafebabe (894) on Thursday December 25 2014, @08:31AM (#129059) Journal

          Drives don't flip bits for no reason. Every data record (sector) has a checksum.

          That isn't an end-to-end checksum. Also, ATA drives autonomously substitute sectors when regenerative checksums exceed a threshold. What algorithm and threshold? That is proprietary and varies with each revision of firmware on each model of each manufacturer's drives.

          How often does a modern Windows box force you to rescan the HDD?

          After every Blue Screen Of Death.

          --
          1702845791×2
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:53PM (#128134)
        Irrelevant. If you're using periodic fscks on (rare) reboots to detect bits flipped on your drives, you're doing things badly wrong. fsck checks for file system integrity. Not bits flipped anywhere on the drive.

        FWIW extensive checking for file system integrity during reboots just because X weeks have passed is also a stupid thing to be doing.

        If there is a reason that you need to check your filesystem for problems every X weeks or months, you shouldn't be waiting for a reboot after Y months to do so. There's no strong correlation between X and Y.
        • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 22 2014, @01:17AM

          by sjames (2882) on Monday December 22 2014, @01:17AM (#128190) Journal

          Bits flipped in the metadata definitely affect filesystem integrity. The whole scheme is a bit from a previous era. The trend now is towards filesystem level checksums and online integrety checking (beyond journaling).

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:35PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:35PM (#128296)
            You said "How is it that you KNOW that no bit got flipped anywhere on the drive?"

            Not "How is it that you know that no bit got flipped in the filesystem METADATA on the drive"

            Big difference.
            • (Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday December 23 2014, @09:15AM

              by sjames (2882) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @09:15AM (#128619) Journal

              It only matters to your argument if I had said "How is it that you know that no bit got flipped in the filesystem anywhere but in the metadata". I didn't. The whole disk includes the metadata, yes?

      • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday December 22 2014, @02:07AM

        by Geotti (1146) on Monday December 22 2014, @02:07AM (#128199) Journal

        How is it that you KNOW that no bit got flipped anywhere on the drive?

        There's like 10 posts in this tree, but no one suggested ZFS to limit the repercussions of a flipped bit. Makes me wonder...

        • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday December 22 2014, @02:09AM

          by Geotti (1146) on Monday December 22 2014, @02:09AM (#128200) Journal

          Whoops, I overlooked http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=5378&cid=127952 [soylentnews.org] by sjames. *blush*

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @04:21AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @04:21AM (#128223)

          ZFS is a pain in the ass to use with Linux. It's not like Solaris or FreeBSD, where it's pretty much seamless.

        • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday December 25 2014, @02:54PM

          by cafebabe (894) on Thursday December 25 2014, @02:54PM (#129105) Journal

          The gains from using ZFS on one drive are fairly small. Yes, you'll have end-to-end checksums However, it may be preferable to suffer a default filing system and a periodic check.

          --
          1702845791×2
        • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday December 29 2014, @06:04PM

          by cafebabe (894) on Monday December 29 2014, @06:04PM (#130001) Journal

          Not many people are running software RAID and ZFS isn't a huge gain with a single volume. Admittedly, ZFS offers end-to-end checksums but it seems people would rather incur occasional integrity checks rather than incur upgrade, compatibility or recovery problems from something more transparent.

          --
          1702845791×2
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday December 21 2014, @12:41PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 21 2014, @12:41PM (#127999)

      Running the check on a modern HDD may be an hour-long distraction

      The "linux people" have moved on to freebsd, where "zpool scrub zroot" runs in the background. Also on my SSD desktop with only a couple gigs of stuff, a scrub only takes a minute or so. We'll call it 20 seconds per gig. "Modern HDD" is an oxymoron other than multi-terabyte beasts that live in a fileserver at home or the NAS at work. I would have to check but I think I'm down to 4 spinning rust drives at home, 3 multi-terabyte beasts in the fileserver and one in the kids xbox.

      The "enterprise java windows developers" have all taken over linux now and they're spreading their views over linux rather than merging into the community. So you get folks who think the design of systemd is a great idea, etc. We're stuck with windows ME edition thinking, running on a otherwise decent linux kernel.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:37AM

    by Snotnose (1623) on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:37AM (#127879)

    How could a severe bug of this nature even happen in the first place? How can it remain unfixed over three years after it was first reported?

    These are the same jerks that used 'debug' in their module, then generated so many messages that they killed kernel debugging. When called on it they basically said "anybody can use debug, pound sand".

    People with this kind of attitude are capable of all kinds of fuckwittery.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:42AM

      by Snotnose (1623) on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:42AM (#127880)
      --
      Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:52AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:52AM (#127886)

        Disgusting! Simply disgusting!

        What the fuck has happened to the open source development community? Why have the standards sunk so low lately?

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:09AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:09AM (#127896)

          The more popular open source development has become the larger the community has grown. And the more people you have in the "pool" the lower the average becomes. Standards haven't sunk as much as they are simply finding their levels.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:14AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:14AM (#127897)

            Give me the neckbeards over the hipsters any day! While the neckbeards treated us like total shit, at least their software worked well. The hipsters who've taken over? They treat us like total shit, but their software (Firefox, GNOME 3, systemd, and modern Debian, I'm looking at you!) doesn't fucking work, either.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:04AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:04AM (#127981)

              I never really got what it was about, but just figured out that the relatively recent "neckbeard" insult is the hipsters talking about me.

              hmmph. talking shit about K&R gurus as they try to climb whatever ladder they're trying to climb.

              pricks.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:31PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:31PM (#128016)

                K, R, and some of their contemporaries weren't "neckbeards". They were "pioneers", who had well-groomed beards.

                The "neckbeard" insult came about in the 1980s, when fat slobs with unkempt beards started running widely-used UNIX systems at colleges and businesses. These people were total shitbags, who instead of helping users would often act all high-and-mighty and play "God". They were also known for having unusually small penises, hence the grasping for power in any way they could.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:42PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:42PM (#128040)

                https://i.imgur.com/QWkbh.jpg [imgur.com]

                UNIX beards - required for POSIX.1 compliance.

        • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:17AM

          by davester666 (155) on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:17AM (#127898)

          systemd happened. and you will like it. and use it.

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:22AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:22AM (#127899)

            LOL! Absolutely not! I ditched my last Linux system for FreeBSD a few weeks ago. I couldn't be happier! I'm just sad to see Linux falling into such a deep abyss. So much potential is now gone, likely forever.

            • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:27AM

              by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:27AM (#127902)

              Don't you think that's being a little over pessimistic.
              Crises like these are inevitable as an OS tries to occupy new sectors. If there's enough tension it will cause a fork, no huge problem. Sure there'll be a diution of talent for a while. In the mean time stick with the last version before systemd.
              FreeBSD is fine but it's not without it's own problems, the great thing about open software is that we have choice, that's not going away any time soon.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:30AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:30AM (#127903)

                Why does Debian need to "occupy new sectors"? It was doing just fine before all of this systemd idiocy. And what are the problems with FreeBSD? I've been using it for weeks now, and I haven't had any problems. Well, I do have one problem. I regret not switching to FreeBSD years earlier!

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:45AM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:45AM (#127976)

                  cos money talks and bullshit walks

                • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:05PM

                  by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:05PM (#128081) Journal

                  Have you tried running Pale Moon or any other 'old school' browser that uses firefox-compatible add-ons? I don't want to have to run a 'modern' version of FF with its 'improved' interface. The people I support want something than they are comfortable with - and MATE and Pale Moon is ideal for them. Have you tried reading LUKS encrypted drives using BSD? I have 14 drives, all LUKS encrypted, which BSD cannot access. Can you imagine how long it will take to convert those drives to GELI and reformat all of the data? And then I will have drives that Linux machines cannot access.

                  BSD is good - I have it on several machines - but it does not solve all of the problems, indeed it introduces some problems of its own.

                  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:34PM

                    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:34PM (#128091) Journal

                    That was my issue. I tried out PCBSD and I have to say, it required no fiddling -- it installed and just worked. However, I have a LUKS encrypted drive that I can't open in PCBSD so I installed Mint until I transfer that data off that drive and then redo the encryption the BSD way. I also had a trouble reading off an EXT3 drive I was using for the test and it got corrupted during a hard shutoff (windy night, momentary power failure). That wasn't awe inspiring.

                    Interestingly, video was super smooth in PCBSD. In Mint it isn't bad but it is noticeably choppy. PCBSD boots in maybe 30-40 seconds, Mint boots in about 5 seconds or less --it is shockingly fast at booting. Still, I'd suffer through 25 seconds of boot time to enjoy perfectly smooth video. The hassle for me is going to be migrating all my drives off EXT3.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @02:16AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @02:16AM (#128202)

          You're just not crying loud enough. You have to get over 120db if you want to force others to hand feed you.

          F'r cryin' out loud, it is a minor bug that will be easy to fix. Get over yourselves.

        • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday December 29 2014, @05:40PM

          by cafebabe (894) on Monday December 29 2014, @05:40PM (#129992) Journal

          I blame Dunbar's number [wikipedia.org].

          --
          1702845791×2
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:36AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:36AM (#127963) Homepage
      They used the *kernel*'s "debug" flag to turn on their own outragiously-verbose debugging. As emphasised when the systemd bug first hit LKML, albeit with a totally backasswards kernel workaround: http://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/2/415 . Systemd tossers apparently didn't realise that just because the kernel graciously lets userspace receive configuration options from the bootloader via its (the kernel's) cmdline, that doesn't mean userspace programs can do anything with the kernel command line.

      Andrew Morton won the discussion that followed that bug, IMHO: http://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/2/422
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 2) by subs on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:44AM

    by subs (4485) on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:44AM (#127881)
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:49AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:49AM (#127885)

      If you want ZFS, why the fuck would you use Linux, where it's a royal pain in the ass to use?

      Just use FreeBSD. You get ZFS, out of the box. You get the best of the Linux experience, but without all of the idiocy of the past few years. And best of all, it's free! Not only does it cost nothing, but it tends to include software that's released under truly free licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses, and not encumbered licenses like those in the GPL family.

      Fuck, you're even better off using Solaris if you really want ZFS that badly.

      • (Score: 2) by subs on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:55AM

        by subs (4485) on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:55AM (#127887)

        Because poster uses Linux and using ZFS nowadays on Linux is about as difficult as installing a few packages.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:06AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:06AM (#127893)

          Do the installers of any of the major distros' installers have support for ZFS? Do they make it just as easy to use ZFS for root as it is to use EXT4 or JFS or XFS or even ResierFS for root? If I have to "install a few packages" to use it, doesn't that mean that I need to use some other filesystem for root, and then go through the hassle of installing these packages and then setting up a separate ZFS partition somewhere?

      • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:03AM

        by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:03AM (#127890)

        I've been using ZFSonLinux for 2 years with a variety of Debian servers. With the right controller (I use very affordable LSI controllers), it's very stable and performs well.
        I considered BSD but there's no BSD that supports ZFS and Xen Dom0. Debian handles this well.

        • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:17AM

          by TheRaven (270) on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:17AM (#127986) Journal
          FYI: FreeBSD can run Xen dom0 on x86 and ARM, though the patches (by Roger Paul Monné at Citrix / XenSource) are not yet in a release. Hopefully 10.2 will support both out of the box. I wouldn't recommend it for a serious deployment yet, but it's probably worth evaluating.
          --
          sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:05AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:05AM (#127891)

        Because Linux is more stable on any random box than FreeBSD. kmem map too small? All three boxes. Linux runs flawlessly on them though.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:09AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:09AM (#127895)

          How the fuck can you say that "Linux is more stable" than FreeBSD when this submission shows that a goddamn boot-time fsck run will prevent the Linux system from booting until the fsck is done, with no safe way to cancel it?!

          FreeBSD doesn't screw around, and so they don't use systemd, and so it can't suffer from this problem.

          • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:07AM

            by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:07AM (#127945) Journal

            Maybe you want to learn what "stable" means. And more importantly, what it does not mean.

            --
            The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:34PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:34PM (#128017)

              Piss off, maxwell demon.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Snotnose on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:10AM

      by Snotnose (1623) on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:10AM (#127925)

      CSB. Back about '97/'98 I was on a large project that had a weekly meeting to co-ordinate the various groups (7-8 groups, I had about 20 people under me at the time and I was typical). One group was running Linux and liking it (the rest of us had Solaris workstations). One week they came in and reported "One of our tools is eating disk space, we don't know which one, and rebooting doesn't bring it back". I asked if they'd run f-suck recently, they gave me a blank look. I told them to eff ess cee kay their hard drives, and got a bunch of "who the hell is this guy?" looks.

      Next week's meeting I was a god :)

      /CSB

      --
      Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:45AM (#127883)

    I can't believe what has happened to Debian, and Linux in general.

    I first started using Linux after Windows 95 kept crapping out on me. Linux was better in so many ways. It was stable! It had great filesystems! It performed better! And it didn't cost me anything, other than some time to set it up and learn how to use it!

    Linux used to make me better off. But today? Linux is a fucking joke. It's inferior to Windows and OS X, I'm sad to say.

    Why would anyone want to use Linux when they're subjected to systemd, or GNOME 3, or any of that other crap that's ruining the Linux experience? Why?

    • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:22AM

      by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:22AM (#127900)

      That's the great thing about a free OS. Don't use systemd if you don't want, you are not forced into a particular mix of programs.
      If you don't like the choices made, switch to a different distro. Or even compile and change programs yourself. These are things you cannot do with windows or OS X.
      There will certainly be forks without systemd, in the meantime security updated are still valid for another 18 months at least (Debian wheezy).
      Having said that, I like pre 10.10 OS X as a workstation OS (with macports) but would never use it as a server.

      • (Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:26AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:26AM (#127901)

        I'd used Debian for years. What other Linux distro works just as well as Debian, but doesn't come with systemd? Gentoo might be an option, but I'm not convinced that it won't get systemdified at some point. I feel more confident in thinking that Slackware won't ever offer systemd, but Slackware is a fossil. I want a relatively modern experience, but without wasting my time waiting for shit to compile, and without having to configure every single little thing manually. FreeBSD is the only option I can see, but it isn't Linux.

        • (Score: 2) by novak on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:33AM

          by novak (4683) on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:33AM (#127939) Homepage

          Ok, I have to take issue with this. Partially because I like slackware, but also partially because you don't seem to think through your own argument.

          You want, apparently, debian exactly. Except no systemd. So... Use devuan?
          Also, wanting "debian exactly" but not systemd gets more contradictory every year. Debian has been riddled with poorly thought-out crapware like gnome3 and pulse for the last several years, and that's EXACTLY why systemd is now their init system. They follow popularity over quality. Every new release of debian has been measurably worse in code quality, well, at least since five.

          So now you still want that, except this latest action is just over the line. Well, that's the direction they are headed. Towards worse code. So if you lose systemd, then the next thing they do probably sucks even more (not sure how that's possible, but they'll swing it somehow), and you have the same problem all over again.

          And then you look at one distro that doesn't force crap on users, instead choosing to use whatever Patrick feels is actually best in stead of blindly "welp, the redhat PR team says it's great, so we'll go with it." And you dismiss that distro as a relic. Guess what: It might not seem "modern" to you but it's actually standing up for what users want, which seems to be exactly your problem with debian. I'm sorry you had to lose your distro, but maybe it's time to stand with people who will stand with you, instead of hoping to latch on to the easiest to use software like a remora.

          There are more distros out there without systemd than slackware, find one you like and make it work.

          --
          novak
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:12AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:12AM (#127983)

            > There are more distros out there without systemd than slackware,

            please list them. a grateful public awaits your reply.

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:38PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:38PM (#128019)

            We can't actually use Devuan until a release is actually available. So you can fuck off with that suggestion.

            And systemd infects Debian these days. In the past, I could install and run my Debian systems completely without using Lennart's or GNOME's shitty software. That's no longer the case. Now it is forced up me.

            Yeah, we want Debian without systemd back. It worked fine for us. We don't need this systemd bullshit.

            The only reason Slackware is "immune" to systemd is because Slackware is still stuck in 1998, for crying out loud! By your reasoning, the shitty HP-UX workstation I used in the early 1990s is "modern", too!

            • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:38PM

              by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:38PM (#128093) Journal

              Debian Wheezy does NOT use systemd - and will be supported for quite a while yet. Use Debian - it is simple, and you can stop complaining about the quality of a release that hasn't yet happened. Oh, you mean that you have already switched to Jessie and forgot that it hasn't even finished its development cycle yet? Well, perhaps you ought to think long and hard about what you want from your system and then choose the appropriate release.

              Furthermore, even Jessie allows you to remove systemd and continue to use initd. Nobody is forcing you to use systemd!

            • (Score: 2) by novak on Monday December 22 2014, @06:19AM

              by novak (4683) on Monday December 22 2014, @06:19AM (#128237) Homepage

              We can't actually use Devuan until a release is actually available. So you can fuck off with that suggestion.

              Yeah, I guess they don't plan to release until around the time a new debian stable comes out, in the mean time you can use debian 7, which has no systemd.

              Yeah, we want Debian without systemd back. It worked fine for us. We don't need this systemd bullshit.

              As do more than a few others. My point is that debian started dying years ago but no one could be bothered to notice then. It's only after the devs have delivered the final, killing blow to debian that people are starting to realize what happened.

              Slackware is still stuck in 1998

              No, it's not. At all, in any way. I assume you're either an idiot or haven't tried it if you say that. Slackware is a quality modern system, incorporating essentially all the same software as debian.

              By your reasoning, the shitty HP-UX workstation I used in the early 1990s is "modern", too!

              Ok, so, first, you're comparing hardware and software, which means you're either too angry or too stupid to think logically. Breathe. Second, slackware 14.1 is more up to date than debian stable. Just because you haven't bothered to try to understand something doesn't make it antiquated. Stop waving your lower jaw around like that and dissing the few good systems left.

              --
              novak
        • (Score: 2) by present_arms on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:56PM

          by present_arms (4392) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:56PM (#128101) Homepage Journal

          PCLinuxOS runs as stable as Debian, (I've ran both still do pclinuxos) no systemd shite for me for me :D

          --
          http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:27AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:27AM (#127920)

        Slackware is about the only distro that does not use systemd. You don't have much choice any more. Stop contributing to Debhat, and they may get the message, or arrogantly stick to systemd.

    • (Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:33AM

      by tftp (806) on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:33AM (#127905) Homepage

      Why would anyone want to use Linux when they're subjected to systemd, or GNOME 3, or any of that other crap that's ruining the Linux experience? Why?

      Because people may not want to dance to the tune of Win8/Win10. Win8 already does everything in its power to convince you to use your MS email for a login, and then to use MS services for everything that you do on the Internet. Win7 was the last release of Windows that was made "for the customer." Following releases are made for Microsoft, not for you. That's why you are given the bland, flat, pastel interface that is hard on your eyes - because it is good for Microsoft's bank account, as simpler decorations do not require a complex GPU.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:37AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:37AM (#127907)

        What you're saying is self contradictory. On one hand you say that the Windows 8+ experience is bad, which it is, without any doubt. Yet all of the major modern Linux distros give you such a similar experience in most ways. If I want to avoid Windows 8+, why would I use something else that tries so hard to give such a similar experience? Just because I don't want to stick a screwdriver into my scrotum doesn't mean that I'm somehow better off if I stick a rusty nail into my scrotum instead.

        • (Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:16AM

          by tftp (806) on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:16AM (#127916) Homepage

          Yet all of the major modern Linux distros give you such a similar experience in most ways

          There are many distros that work for me. Shortage of Linux distros is not something that anyone, ever complained about. In worst case you can always hack one, or compile your own [gentoo.org], or make a new one from scratch. In the latter case it's a lot of work, but if the demand is real (and not just inside of your head) then you will have a good team to do this in a reasonable time. The major difference with Windows is that you can do it, both technically and legally.

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:22AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:22AM (#127918)

            I don't have time to "hack" on my own distro, nor to roll one from scratch. I don't want to wait six months for Gentoo to compile on my Thinkpad. I don't want to use Slackware, and feel like I'm back in 1996. All I want is what Debian was a couple of years ago: a distro that was reliable, but still did all of the hard work for me, with an init system that just plain worked. In fact, Debian today would be perfect for me, if it didn't come infected with systemd. I'm not going to just use an old version of Debian, either, because I want to be able to easily use new versions of Chromium, and I want to make sure I get other security updates, too. There is a big shortage of good Linux distros today, now that almost all of them have gone stupid with systemd. Gentoo doesn't cut it. Slackware is ancient. Other than that, there's no good Linux distro. Hell, the whole point of using a distro in the first place is so that it's developers and package maintainers do the hard stuff so I don't have to! It totally defeats the purpose of using a distro if I have to start hacking on it just to make it barely usable!

            • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:30PM

              by Thexalon (636) on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:30PM (#128004)

              Doing some of your research for you, some options:
              * PCLinuxOS [pclinuxos.com]
              * Crux [crux.nu]
              * as GP mentioned, Slackware still works, and has been kept quite up-to-date.

              None of them have been showing any signs of adopting systemd.

              --
              The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:01PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:01PM (#128102)

              "All I want is..."
              Translated:
              - run the latest and greatest,
              - have the system magically be to my tastes, including the way low-level processes operate, even though I don't code or use the system at a low level,
              - not contribute to it,
              - not pay a dime for it.

              Apparently, given how many people are complaining while explicitly stating they do not want to contribute, it actually has already been The Year Of The Linux Desktop.

            • (Score: 2) by metamonkey on Monday December 22 2014, @04:15PM

              by metamonkey (3174) on Monday December 22 2014, @04:15PM (#128369)

              Right now I'm still running debian on my desktop and laptop, and not a systemd lib in sight. In the future, there will be forks without systemd. The world is not ending.

              I agree it is sad, though, to see so many quality distros making such a terrible choice. It's inconceivable to me. How anyone who knows anything about UNIX can think this bloated crapware at PID 1 is a good idea is beyond me.

              --
              Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:40AM

      by Arik (4543) on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:40AM (#127923) Journal

      Why would anyone want to use Linux when they're subjected to systemd, or GNOME 3, or any of that other crap that's ruining the Linux experience? Why?

      Your error is a false premise, Linux [slackware.org] does not include systemd, nor GNOME.

      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:58AM

      by sjames (2882) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:58AM (#127956) Journal

      Fortunately, in my testing, I found that I can install Debian Jessie with sysV init, xfce4 as the desktop and btrfs as the root filesystem. It's a shame I have to use expert mode and shell out a couple times during the install but at least I can do it. I'm hoping Devuan will pick up the ball from there.

      So that's how I can stay with Linux.

    • (Score: 2) by morgauxo on Monday December 22 2014, @02:41PM

      by morgauxo (2082) on Monday December 22 2014, @02:41PM (#128326)

      I use Linux. I don't use Systemd. I don't use Gnome.

  • (Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:30AM

    by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:30AM (#127904) Journal

    I got home, turned on my computer, and systemd decided it was time to run fsck on my 1TB hard drive.

    Not that it would be the first inexplicably dumb choice in systemd, but I suspect that the "decision" had nothing to do with systemd. It's perfectly fair to blame systemd for not starting fsck in such a way as to permit the user to cancel it, but it's not fair to blame it for a decision that, AFAIK, is still handled by fsck.

    Normally init doesn't make decisions about what to check -- rather, all filesystems are fscked indiscriminately (e.g. by fsck -A), and the fsck running against each filesystem checks various flags (e.g. whether the filesystem was cleanly unmounted) to determine if a complete check is needed. The periodic checks (... has been mounted %u times without being checked or ... has gone %u days without being checked) are determined by comparing the mount count and last fsck time (read from the filesystem) with the maximum mount count/maximum time settings (also read from the filesystem), and have nothing to do with systemd. If you don't want your system to do these, or would prefer it do them less often, use tune2fs with the -c and/or -i options to tweak the maximum mounts and/or maximum time.

    (Interesting note -- when poking about in the e2fstools source to find the text of the reasons for periodic checks, I noticed some code that effectively doubles the stated maximums if running on battery (subject to the defer_check_on_battery option in e2fsck.conf, default is true). Cool, and possibly a helpful dodge in such a "Boot NOW!" situation, if the machine in question is a laptop.)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:41AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:41AM (#127910)

      But it's not at all a problem that fsck chose to run when it did. It's perfectly fine that it ran, and in fact it's probably the right thing to do, especially if the filesystem may need to be repaired.

      There's only one problem here, and that's that systemd is buggy and prevented this perfectly legitimate run of fsck to be canceled manually, when the operator deems that acceptable to do.

      This is nothing but a problem with systemd, and only systemd.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Subsentient on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:33AM

    by Subsentient (1111) on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:33AM (#127906) Homepage Journal

    In the Epoch Init System [universe2.us], if you have such a job set up you want to kill, hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and it kills that job and continues to the next one. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL again in the next 5 seconds, it starts rebooting orderly. I can't tell you how useful that has proven to be for me.

    --
    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:12AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:12AM (#127915)

      Can I use this easily with Debian?

      • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:21AM

        by Subsentient (1111) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:21AM (#127947) Homepage Journal

        Yes. I use Epoch on a PowerPC eMac G4 running Debian testing.

        --
        "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:11PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:11PM (#128140) Homepage

      What if you want to cancel two jobs in a row? *cue reboot*

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:40AM (#127909)

    By a M$ tech to make Linux suck, discouraging users into going back to winblows. Even so, I will stick with Linux because I know it'l get fixed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:24AM (#127919)

      When do you think it will be fixed by?

      I thought that GNOME 3 would have been fixed by now. That still hasn't happened.

      I thought that Firefox would have been fixed by now. That still hasn't happened.

      Debian has been broken for a few months now. When will it get fixed? Will I have to wait 5 years? A decade?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:41AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:41AM (#127924)

        1-It'll get fixed when it gets fixed
        2-Which is why I use gnome-fallback
        3-Which is why I use Chrome
        4-Don't know what to tell you, it works fine for me.

      • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:25AM

        by Subsentient (1111) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:25AM (#127949) Homepage Journal

        1. It'll be fixed when everyone runs Epoch [universe2.us] for init.
        2. That's why I use XFCE.
        3. I still like Firefox. I got used to Australis and while I preferred the old GUI, it doesn't matter too much to me.
        4. I never liked Debian. I always preferred Red Hat based distros. Gotta give Debian points for keeping a PowerPC distro going though.

        --
        "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
      • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday December 25 2014, @01:50PM

        by cafebabe (894) on Thursday December 25 2014, @01:50PM (#129091) Journal

        Debian has been broken for a few months now. When will it get fixed? Will I have to wait 5 years? A decade?

        Recently publicized bugs in Windows, bash and systemd suggest that it'll take 20 years or more to fix systemd. Unfortunately, fads in computing tend to come around every 15 years or so. This means the next generation will throw out systemd shortly before it is mature.

        --
        1702845791×2
  • (Score: 2) by forsythe on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:42AM

    by forsythe (831) on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:42AM (#127911)

    I dislike systemd, I don't use it (or pulseaudio, or consolekit, or udev, or...). I fully sympathize with those who encounter difficulties while forced to use it at gunpoint by roving bands of militants. My heart goes out to those who cannot install a different operating system without endangering the lives of their captive families, as well as to those whose computers have been rigged with explosives, wired to detonate if the network card attempts to download Gentoo, Slackware, *BSD, etc.

    However, this is a site I want to come to to read news, not to have a daily 2 minutes of hate against that which does not share my ideological beliefs. If I want to have a lengthy conversation about why the software I use is the best software, why my political views are the best political views, or why my preferred brand of orange juice is the only digestible stuff on the market, my house contains enough mirrors for the purpose.

    --------

    In all seriousness, I get that stories on Gnome 3/systemd/U.S.A. politics/etc. generate comments and all that, but I don't think the price is worth it.

    (I appreciated the story on NTP, however. That was informative news.)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:18AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:18AM (#127917)

      Hogwash!

      This submission is very relevant news, especially for this site.

      I would never have expected my Linux system, which unfortunately does now run systemd after it was forced on my by an update, to be subject to such an awful flaw.

      This could have prevented my system from booting!

      But thanks to SoylentNews, now I know, and I can prepare my system so that this problem is avoided!

      This is just the kind of news I come here to read.

      I didn't find this news, which is very relevant to me directly, on CNN, or MSNBC, or BBC, or any of the other news sites I frequent.

      I really don't know why you think this is about "hate" or "ideological beliefs" or "political views".

      This is about very broken software that was forced on lots of people and that, as the summary has informed me, actually prevent my system from booting during a very normal operation!

      SoylentNews editors, please keep posting news like this!

      Reading this news submission probably saved me a lot of time, and allowed me to keep my Linux system usable!

      Please keep posting systemd submissions!

      Reading about systemd problems here has saved my ass and I am grateful to you for making us aware of these problems before we too become victims of them!

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:23AM

      by Marand (1081) on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:23AM (#127928) Journal

      However, this is a site I want to come to to read news, not to have a daily 2 minutes of hate against that which does not share my ideological beliefs.

      I actually found this one to be informative and useful for me. I expected another useless flamebait summary, but instead got informed of a potential gotcha with systemd as init. Reading the linked bug report thread, including its followups, also taught me that systemd also likes to disable magic sysrq keys [wikipedia.org].

      Redhat considers this NOTABUG [redhat.com], Mageia did too but bowed to pressure and re-enabled it [mageia.org], and Debian decided it wasn't systemd's place to change this and re-enabled sysrq [debian.org].

      Thanks to this article, I learned about two systemd gotchas I need to remember when dealing with systemd-enabled machines. The sysrq one is especially a big deal, because the times you need the sysreq keys, things are already too hosed to play with trying to enable them. It's not something you need often, but you expect it to work when you do. I saved a laptop from a reboot earlier today using sysrq-k on Xorg, in fact. I would have been pissed if my init had one day decided I'm not adult enough to use them and forced me to cut power instead.

      So, while I agree that we had a pretty bad string of AC systemd troll submissions before, this particular submission has merit, because it's actually providing a link to some useful info I (and likely others) wouldn't have known about otherwise. This is something the systemd users may want to know, and in fact, it's probably more useful to them than to systemd haters.

      • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:36AM

        by Marand (1081) on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:36AM (#127929) Journal

        I should also add, now that I've read father in the chain, that this doesn't affect only fsck. According to another message [debian.org], you can't break out of anything that hangs or takes an excessively long time to start with ^C during bootup, so it's definitely an important gotcha to be aware of.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:54AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:54AM (#127978)

          You want a rant? I've got that.

          Running jessie on my laptop, figured I'd give the thing a fair shot and learn about it on a non critical system long before considering migrating the servers a couple months after the stable release as we usually do.

          I run into new breakage every day, be it trying to hijack ifconfig with race condition fun, acpi shutdown now borked, and sleep mode totally unavailable since an update a couple weeks ago. The half baked bugs I can deal with, there's still time in the oven. The restrictive design choices hurt so bad since they are anathema to why we use a highly-configurable (read: tunable) OS in the first place. Debian needs a Mint edition to fix this, but the third party repos negate a number of the major advantages of using Debian Stable in the first place. OpenBSD is calling but no one wants to deal with the upheaval and retooling. This is not how I want to spend my time guys.

          --angry customer and soon to be former DD after a decade and a half of faithful service to the project.

          • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:52PM

            by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:52PM (#128098) Journal

            If you don't want to run testing and have to put up with the problems that it will throw up, why don't you just stick with Wheezy for another 18 months and see how things pan out? I'm not trolling, I simply cannot understand why you would chose Jessie knowing that it hasn't even been released yet and that the release will probably throw up a whole load of problems which will need sorting out before it is ready for prime-time.

            • (Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:13PM

              by Arik (4543) on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:13PM (#128122) Journal
              For the same reason the same demographic left Slackware and does not want to return to it.

              It's irrational as all heck but still a powerful lot of people are emotionally invested in constantly having and using the newest $whatever. They WANT their computer constantly running out and downloading and installing new stuff all the time without intervention.
              --
              If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:46AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:46AM (#128181)

              And what does he do after those 18 months are up? Does he just stop installing security updates, and let his systems become progressively more vulnerable? Does he just stop using his computers completely? This "keep using Wheezy" crap is just that: complete crap! It's just delaying an eventual disaster slightly. The disaster is still going to come. It doesn't prevent it at all. It doesn't even mitigate it.

              • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday December 22 2014, @08:34AM

                by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 22 2014, @08:34AM (#128253) Journal

                Well, try thinking a bit differently....

                After 18 months, perhaps all these problems will have been resolved and, who knows, perhaps systemd will have even been dropped. If you don't have to change your system today - don't change it!

                You have 18 months to see what the community decides is a better path and join in the one that most suits you. You have 18 months to find one of the 20+ other distros that are not using systemd. (No - do your own homework - or even try reading other stories here where they are listed). You have 18 months to learn how to switch Jessie from systemd to sysvinit - 10 minutes work at most. You have 18 months to learn about how your computer works and to find the solution that gives you exactly what you want. You even have 18 months to save up for a Window's licence - but I don't think that it is a good use of your time or your money. Essentially, if we are talking about a home computer - even one being used professionally at home - then there is no reason to upgrade today to something that you know does not work. If you are supporting other computers then you have 18 months to plan a sensible upgrade path and find alternative solutions.

                Again, I reiterate, nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade to systemd for a considerable period of time. Why on earth are people panicking about systemd now? It's a pile of crap - but so is a lot of software. Just don't use it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:33PM (#128031)

      If the systemd stories "don't belong here", as you claim, then why do they always seem to get so many comments? Like this one has over 80 comments, while the submission on the front page with the next most comments has only 17! Some of the other submissions, even those that have been on the front page for some time now, only have 2 or 3 comments. Systemd is something that people here obviously want to talk about. That's why these systemd submissions always have so many comments. Some of the earlier submissions have broken 100 comments, which is very rare here.

      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:54PM

        by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:54PM (#128099) Journal

        Why is it that systemd stories result in lots of comments from ACs, while the other stories with far fewer comments sometimes don't see an AC at all? Just asking.....

        • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday December 22 2014, @12:38AM

          by DECbot (832) on Monday December 22 2014, @12:38AM (#128175) Journal

          Why make multiple accounts for astroturfing when you can post anonymously multiple times?

          --
          cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:53AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:53AM (#128183)

          I just looked at some of the other stories on the front page that have nothing to do with systemd. I see AC comments there. The proportion of comments from ACs relative to comments from registered users appears to be consistent, too.

          There are actually more comments from registered users for this particular submission than there are comments from ACs (103 in total; 76 from registered users, and 27 from ACs).

          I had to go back a couple of days to find a story [soylentnews.org] with only comments from registered users. Of course, that story only has 3 comments in total!

  • (Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:12AM

    by Arik (4543) on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:12AM (#127926) Journal
    First off partition your disk. You dont need 1tb in a single slice, and it's a disaster waiting to happen. Partition it out with generous allowances for /boot /home /var and /usr and stagger the auto-fscks and kill a flock of birds with one stone. It's insanity to use a terabyte slice for anything - even if you really truly NEED one you should make 10 100gb slices instead, then hand them over to your LVM to make the terabyte slice back out of them.

    Second, quit turning your dang laptop off. Suspend to disk. It's not the 90s anymore, we've had it for years, it works like a dream, use it.

    Lastly, systemd. Of course it isnt going to let you interrupt it once it decides to do something, you grubby luser.

    That really seems to be their attitude. And it's one that will be self-fulfilling, I feel. People that accept that categorization of themselves will be happy to have less responsibility and less to think about as they are given fewer choices to make.

    And those that disagree, will simply avoid the systemd infection. There are still great Linux based systems without them - Slackware and Gentoo are the largest. There are still BSDs too if it comes to that.

    So in summary, in order to find yourself dealing with this problem as described, you have to have made 3 big mistakes - single slice partitioning, shutting your laptop down instead of suspending work, AND using systemd.

    Three strikes and you are out.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:58AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:58AM (#127967)
      > Second, quit turning your dang laptop off. Suspend to disk. It's not the 90s anymore, we've had it for years, it works like a dream, use it.

      No, it doesn't work! Suspend on laptops, even older ones, is one thing you expect NOT to work with Linux.

      > So in summary, in order to find yourself dealing with this problem as described, you have to have made 3 big mistakes - single > slice partitioning, shutting your laptop down instead of suspending work, AND using systemd. Three strikes and you are out.

      You should remove BACKSPACE key in your keyboard, since you never need to correct yourself.
      • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:57AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:57AM (#127979)

        You should remove BACKSPACE key in your keyboard, since you never need to correct yourself.

        He can't -- the dumb-ass appears to be using a fucking typewriter.

        What a twat; would ya look at that font choice?

      • (Score: 1) by dweezil-n0xad on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:58PM

        by dweezil-n0xad (275) on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:58PM (#128013)

        No, it doesn't work! Suspend on laptops, even older ones, is one thing you expect NOT to work with Linux.

        Suspend in Linux works fine in my experience.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:16PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:16PM (#128029)

          You must have that one specific early-2000s-era Thinkbook model where suspend isn't a total disaster. The rest of us happen to use other laptops and desktops that aren't that one specific early-2000s-era Thinkbook model where suspend isn't a total disaster. So for us, suspend is a total disaster!

          • (Score: 1) by dweezil-n0xad on Monday December 22 2014, @11:52AM

            by dweezil-n0xad (275) on Monday December 22 2014, @11:52AM (#128291)
            My laptop is an Asus N56 from the end of 2013. Very fast suspend and resume, no problems at all. OS is Gentoo Linux (without systemd).
            I remember having hangs after a resume when I was using Ubuntu on a cheap Lenovo laptop in 2010. Those problems disappeared when I switched that laptop to Arch Linux. Ubuntu is known for problems with suspend.
      • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:15PM

        by Arik (4543) on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:15PM (#128036) Journal
        "No, it doesn't work! Suspend on laptops, even older ones, is one thing you expect NOT to work with Linux."

        1996 called, they would like their FUD back.
        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:49PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:49PM (#128042)

          I don't think it's FUD. I've never had suspend or hibernate work out-of-the-box on any Linux system I've ever used, regardless of the distro, regardless of whether it was a desktop a laptop, and regardless of who manufactured the hardware. I've gotten it to work, but only after doing lots of reading online, lots of fiddling, and ultimately wasting far too much of my time.

    • (Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:01AM

      by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:01AM (#127968) Journal

      Why should my default behavior be to split my disk into multiple data partitions, and how is using a single partition for data a disaster waiting to happen? Disks typically fail for mechanical reasons; partitioning will not save you there. I consider it best practice to have a single root partition and a single swap partition, unless I have good reasons to do otherwise. Needlessly splitting of /usr or /home is just setting yourself up for pain when you discover you need more space for /home and less space for /usr than you expected, or vice versa. If you're using NFS or something then yeah by all means slice up your FS, but otherwise ... what's the point?

      • (Score: 1) by neleai on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:28AM

        by neleai (4923) on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:28AM (#127974)

        Why should my default behavior be to split my disk into multiple data partitions, and how is using a single partition for data a disaster waiting to happen? Disks typically fail for mechanical reasons; partitioning will not save you there. I consider it best practice to have a single root partition and a single swap partition, unless I have good reasons to do otherwise. Needlessly splitting of /usr or /home is just setting yourself up for pain when you discover you need more space for /home and less space for /usr than you expected, or vice versa. If you're using NFS or something then yeah by all means slice up your FS, but otherwise ... what's the point?

        It is also used when you have different distros then you use separate / and common /home partions.

      • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday December 21 2014, @12:10PM

        by Marand (1081) on Sunday December 21 2014, @12:10PM (#127996) Journal

        If you're using NFS or something then yeah by all means slice up your FS, but otherwise ... what's the point?

        I don't agree with going batshit-crazy and making dozens of partitions, but having /home on its own apart from / isn't a bad idea. If you have to do a reinstall or decide to change distros it's a lot easier because you can just wipe and reinstall /, and your data (the stuff you actually care about) can be left alone. You can also have multiple distros installed on their own root partitions, all using the same home dir. Good for experimentation or just having an emergency backup install in case something goes horribly wrong with your normal install.

        It also lets you have a much smaller root partition, since the bulk of your storage use will usually be in /home. That means you can get to a usable system faster even when you need (or want) to fsck, and afterward you can remount /home read-only and fsck it while in a mostly-usable system.

        TL;DR: Separating /home from the root has saved me a fair amount of frustration in the past, though I find further separation to be overkill for most situations.

        • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday December 25 2014, @01:55PM

          by cafebabe (894) on Thursday December 25 2014, @01:55PM (#129093) Journal

          It was standard practice on the Amiga to have a boot/application partition and a data partition. If the data partition was screwed, it was possible to boot and attempt recovery. If the boot partition was screwed, data was safe and re-installation could proceed from floppy disks.

          For desktop Unix systems, a variation of this arrangement is to include a partition for dedicated swap-space. If one wishes to minimize harddisk head seek time, the swap-space partition should be arranged between the system and data partitions.

          I've tried more complicated arrangements but they are only worthwhile if you wish to purge large quantities of data on a regular basis.

          --
          1702845791×2
          • (Score: 2) by Marand on Friday December 26 2014, @01:12AM

            by Marand (1081) on Friday December 26 2014, @01:12AM (#129193) Journal

            That's basically what my setup is -- partitions for /, /home, and swap -- except I think the swap partition's at the end instead of in the middle. I don't actually use swap that much so it's largely irrelevant where it is, but I still prefer having it on its own partition instead of using swap files. I just didn't think to mention swap since the discussion seemed to be more about partitioning the actual file stuff. If you have a lot of RAM, there's also the niche case of using ramdisks for certain parts of the filesystem, but that's getting even farther away from disk storage and partitioning...

            You have the same experience with over-partitioning that I do, basically. Too much becomes annoying to deal with eventually, but keeping the system stuff separate from the user stuff just tends to be good sense for a lot of reasons. Something else I didn't think to mention is that SSDs add another reason to do that kind of split, because you can put your OS and apps on the SSD and have the user data on the spinning disk, so that you have lots of space for data while getting the SSD speed increase.

            You can even do it in Windows, at least with Windows 7! It's a bit harder to get set up that way, but it can be done and it's worth it IMO because OS problems won't wipe out your files and settings. It should really be the default setup, but I get why it isn't. User space needs differ so it's not a one-size-fits-all solution the same way that dumping everything onto the same partition is.

            • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday December 29 2014, @05:57PM

              by cafebabe (894) on Monday December 29 2014, @05:57PM (#129998) Journal

              Putting your swap space at the end is possibly more efficient if you have a perpetually full disk.

              Regardless, if you wish to reduce the volume of writes to your SSD boot and application disk (and further increase access speed), add the noatime option in /etc/fstab. For each volume, this eliminates filing system writes to update access times. (This option is also useful for databases and high volume SMTP servers.)

              --
              1702845791×2
      • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:16PM

        by Arik (4543) on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:16PM (#128015) Journal
        "Disks typically fail for mechanical reasons; partitioning will not save you there"

        It's no magic bullet but it does make dealing with it a bit easier.

        "I consider it best practice to have a single root partition and a single swap partition, unless I have good reasons to do otherwise."

        So first off, with that setup, any process can fill the hard disk with temp files and cause all kinds of problems here. It's a pretty big deal when that happens on the root partition.

        Put /var on it's own partition, and make /tmp a link to /var/tmp, and the same occurrence becomes a trivial annoyance instead.

        You should put /home on its own partition for the same reasons. Lots of stuff gets to write to the home directory, if any of it ever goes berserk, for any reason, having /home on its own slice saves lots of toil and trouble.

        And /usr is where post-boot software is installed - in many systems the majority of the disk space is used for this. Giving this its own slice is done simply to reduce the total size of /. Because the larger a slice is the longer it takes to fsck it - and it's not a linear scale. A very small / partition will fsck before you can notice it and hit ctrl-c - which is exactly the behaviour we want here. A very large slice can take hours. It's always faster to fsck 10 100gb disks than to fsck the same disk in a single terabyte slice.

        "Needlessly splitting of /usr or /home is just setting yourself up for pain when you discover you need more space for /home and less space for /usr than you expected, or vice versa."

        That's why man invented the LVM. Your physical slices and logical system-facing slices are two totally different beasts now, and if you need more room on /var and /usr but less on /home than you expected (or vice versa) you just adjust the numbers and make it so without disturbing the physical partitioning in the slightest.

        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
        • (Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday December 22 2014, @12:22AM

          by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Monday December 22 2014, @12:22AM (#128169) Journal

          The "a poorly-behaved process can fill the whole hard disk" thing is not a good argument, imo, because the default settings for the ext filesystems is to only let root write to the disk when it's 95% full. I agree with the /home thing if you want to use multiple distros on the same machine, but I typically don't. "It makes fsck run faster" is a poor argument IMO because I have terabyte and larger filesystems and fsck still doesn't take an unreasonable amount of time to run on those. You can also just disable fsck entirely and rely on the journaling to fix any problems if you want.

          I'm not sure what your point is about LVM; if you combine a bunch of slices with LVM, you still have a single filesystem on a large virtual device, so you'll still need to either periodically fsck or rely on journaling.

    • (Score: 1) by Wrong Turn Ahead on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:08AM

      by Wrong Turn Ahead (3650) on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:08AM (#127971)

      Preach it! I remember when it was insane to use an entire 20MB hard drive for a single partition. Of course, I remember much further back than that but twenty is just such a nice number...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:27AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:27AM (#127988)

      > Second, quit turning your dang laptop off. Suspend to disk. It's not the
      > 90s anymore, we've had it for years, it works like a dream, use it.

      I would, but systemd FUCKING BROKE THAT TOO on my laptop.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @11:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @11:25AM (#128283)

      > Second, quit turning your dang laptop off. Suspend to disk. It's not the 90s anymore, we've had it for years, it works like a dream, use it.

      Doesn't work for my ThinkPad since upgrading (haha) to latest Mint LTS. A few other things got worse then actually, and I didn't notice anything getting better. User experience degraded with a software upgrade and after three months I haven't figure fixes => fail

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:14AM

    by sjames (2882) on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:14AM (#127972) Journal

    In my testing, it also refuses to mount a btrfs filesystem in degraded mode. It dumps you to the emergency shell every time. When I researched the issue, I saw that the same problem exists for soft raid. Thus far, no solution has been offered.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:21AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:21AM (#127987)

      this shit just gets better and better.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:01AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:01AM (#128157)

      That 'it' that you're referring to would be the mount command. BTRFS is an experimental filesystem, and it does not have fully working and robust error handling / correcting code. It was a conscious decision on the part of the BTRFS devs to make the user say "yes, really mount it degraded." That way, the user knows that they are currently in dangerous territory, and should probably be checking their most recent backups.

      Absolutely, positively nothing to do with systemd.

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 22 2014, @12:52AM

        by sjames (2882) on Monday December 22 2014, @12:52AM (#128182) Journal

        Sorry, wrong. I had degraded set as an option in fstab because I want it to mount even if a disk is dead so it can email me the bad news and keep running in the mean while. Once in the emergency shell, simply running mount -a successfully mounts all btrfs subvolumes. You are behind the times a bit, btrfs has been around several years and is moving into primetime use. The RAID 5 and 6 modes are seriously not ready for production use but RAID1 mode works just fine.

        Looking at the debug logs, btrfs refuses to even attempt to mount the volume even though I explicitly stated that I want it to mount even with missing drives.

        When I replaced systemd with sysV init, it started working perfectly. That is rather strong proof that the problem was systemd and only systemd.

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:06PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:06PM (#128061)

    It's been standard practice to run disk data tests in boot time since before UNIX. Only exceptions I can think of were a few embedded systems with a burned firmware and DOS.

    Hell, even the bios is running a checksum on itself to test for corrupting and tampering...

    --
    compiling...
    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:45PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:45PM (#128097) Journal

      The problem isn't running the tests then. That's desirable. The problem is not being able to cancel them if you're in a hurry.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:16PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:16PM (#128143) Homepage

    How is this bug severe? fsck never takes more than a second for me, using a partitioned 1TB HDD on a laptop running Arch (and yes, systemd). Unless, of course, your file system is farked, in which case why the hell do you want to skip it?

    I agree that having the option is nice, but if it were me, this feature request (not bug!) would be pretty near the bottom of the pile.

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:55AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:55AM (#128185)

      Not everybody uses btrfs. It can take a long time on ext* filesystems, especially where * isn't 4, or even when it is 4 but journaling is disabled (for the speed bump).