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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: 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!