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Noted Linux expert Chris Siebenmann has described two catastrophic failures involving systemd.
One of the problems he encountered with systemd became apparent during a disastrous upgrade of a system from Fedora 20 to Fedora 21. It involved PID 1 segfaulting during the upgrade process. He isn't the only victim to suffer from this type of bad experience, either. The bug report for this problem is still showing a status of NEW, nearly a month after it was opened.
The second problem with systemd that he describes involves the journalctl utility. It displays log messages with long lines in a way that requires sideways scrolling, as well as displaying all messages since the beginning of time, in forward chronological order. Both of these behaviors contribute to making the tool much less usable, especially in critical situations where time and efficiency are of the essence.
Problems like these raise some serious questions about systemd, and its suitability for use by major Linux distros like Fedora and Debian. How can systemd be used if it can segfault in such a way, or if the tools that are provided to assist with the recovery exhibit such counter-intuitive, if not outright useless, behavior?
Editor's Comment: I am not a supporter of systemd, but if there are only 2 such reported occurrences of this fault, as noted in one of the links, then perhaps it is not a widespread fault but actually a very rare one. This would certainly explain - although not justify - why there has been so little apparent interest being shown by the maintainers. Nevertheless, the fault should still be fixed.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:58PM
> I just can't understand why Debian is still going forward with systemd. How many more of these idiotic, unacceptable problems will there need to be before it's removed?
Perhaps you are misunderstanding their motives. You think "If I were doing this, I would want to produce a quality product." and so you assume they think the same. In your world, once they finally understand the error of their ways, they would repent and sin no more, even if it meant throwing out years of wasted (if shoddy) work.
Imagine someone whose internal thoughts instead go like this: "Sure there are problems here and there, but I'm going to plow ahead anyway." What is that person's motivation?
Now you start to understand what we're up against.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday December 22 2014, @12:22AM