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posted by janrinok on Sunday December 21 2014, @04:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the show-stopper-or-rare-event? dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:09PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:09PM (#128139) Homepage

    Going from `cat foobar | tail` to `journalctl foobar | fold | tail` (Yes, useless cat, I know)

    Wow, that was hard! Damn that systemd making everything harder!

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

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:12AM (#128164)

    Now try it when the log file is partially corrupted due to a bad disk. If you aren't a dumbass, you can still make out some of the log entries when things are done the proper way and text files are used. Now try doing that with journalctl. Oh, fuck you, there's no output at all! Fold and tail all you want, it's not going to do a fucking ounce of good. You'll sit there scratching your head, wondering where the hell the log entries are.

    • (Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:42AM (#128179)

      No disk problems needed. Just turn on log rotation and systemD corrupts the log's it's self 1/4 of the time. It's a known bug that they marked as 'won't fix'

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:57AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:57AM (#128186)

        LOL! Do you have the bug number for this?