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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: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:44PM (#128055)

    Slackware may use the Linux kernel and include open source software, but it's clearly very different from most other contemporary Linux distributions.

    I tried it out recently. It's still stuck in the 90s. The user experience was more like what I remember from when I used Xenix and Digital UNIX way back. It doesn't offer any of the good stuff that Linux distros have offered us since the mid 2000s.

    Slackware uses the Linux kernel, but it's not a Linux distribution in the modern sense of the term.

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  • (Score: 2) by novak on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:54PM

    by novak (4683) on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:54PM (#128057) Homepage

    I'm not really sure what you're talking about. Are you complaining about the lack of a package manager or is there something else?

    I keep hearing this "slackware is stuck in the 90s," and I can't say I agree. Especially if you're installing a server which you don't need a whole lot of software on, slackware is a really good system.

    If you have a list of things you think are wrong/old, I'd be genuinely interested to see them. I bet I think most of them are features.

    --
    novak
    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:17PM (#128066)

      Yes, the lack of a modern package manager is a good example. This doesn't just affect installing software with many dependencies, but also easily keeping software updated.

      But there's also the manual configuration of just about everything. I can install Ubuntu, and have a working desktop system within a few minutes, with only limited, unavoidable manual configuration (like specifying passwords and such). It's the complete opposite when it comes to Slackware.

      Slackware has avoided the really bad new stuff, like systemd, only because it has avoided pretty much everything that has been supported by most distros since 2000!

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:30PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:30PM (#128071)

        the manual configuration of just about everything.

        Doing it by hand = doing it wrong. If not puppet or chef, something homegrown. Computers are supposed to eliminate manual labor, not move it to keyboard/mouse.

        Less than 10 minutes from cold dead iron to working and that includes the freebsd install. Images are of course much faster and seem limited solely by NAS bandwidth (which means pretty fast, except when it isn't...) I guess there's ways to automate OS installers but I'm not doing that enough to be motivated to set it up. I would guess slackware can't be much worse than freebsd.

        • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:32PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:32PM (#128073)

          Why would I want to waste my time with Puppet or Chef when I'm just installing Linux on a single workstation for my own personal use?

          I just use Ubuntu, which sets up everything I need for me, so I don't have to do it myself. Slackware does none of this.

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

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:45PM (#128077)

            on a single workstation

            Thats a world far away from me... I suppose when you reinstall due to hardware failure or whatever, its nice to be automated and do it in minutes/seconds instead of hours of rework.

            Then again you probably have a lot less work to do... No need to screw around with single signon and kerberos and all that

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by novak on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:08PM

        by novak (4683) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:08PM (#128083) Homepage

        I can also have a working desktop within minutes on slackware. Seconds, if you're talking about post OS install. It probably takes longer in ubuntu unless you consider unity a working desktop, which is sort of a stretch (could be wrong about time to install new GUI in ubuntu, as I never run it. I tried 8.04 once and hated it.). I don't know what magical things there are in other distros that slackware lacks, but I'm guessing GUI menus.

        That being said, the reason that slackware doesn't suck is that it requires you to manually configure things. Now... I do prefer having a package manager, but most things are just better when not poorly automated as by ubuntu and friends. Slackware doesn't come with nearly as much crap pre-installed and pre-configured.

        If you don't want to spend five minutes setting up your machine the way you want it then enjoy systemd. That's exactly the kind of attitude that birthed it- features first, ease of use before configurability, users are lazy/idiots and must not have any work to do, and a shiny exterior.

        --
        novak
        • (Score: 1) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:31PM

          by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday December 21 2014, @10:31PM (#128145)

          can also have a working desktop within minutes on slackware. Seconds, if you're talking about post OS install. It probably takes longer in ubuntu unless you consider unity a working desktop, which is sort of a stretch (could be wrong about time to install new GUI in ubuntu, as I never run it. I tried 8.04 once and hated it.). I don't know what magical things there are in other distros that slackware lacks, but I'm guessing GUI menus.

          I'm converting from Opensuse to Slackware. The only things I have problems with (1) are things I haven't found out how to do yet (and these are much smaller than the problems I had in going from, say, Windows to OSX (2) or Win98 to Vista (3)).

          I haven't had any trouble at all with any of the package managers (choice for them, too) in installing/removing software. If you don't like CLI there's always Gslapt (which is good for when I'm feeling lazy).

          It's simple, it works, it's reliable and, when you change your mindset less than you thought you might have to it's also easy. Sounds pretty 21st century stuff to me.

          ------------------------------------------------------------------

          (1) Instead of continuing "doing stuff" with Opensuse and playing with Slackware by dual booting I'm "doing stuff" with Slackware and kept Opensuse on another partition for handholding - haven't needed it yet.

          (2) Had to at work, not on my PC.

          (3) Vista was the big impetus to get me to try Linux (Mandrake)

          --
          It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.