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: 2) by novak on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:50PM
Um, Slackware is not Linux these days ???
Obviously it is, but I would say that Slackware is GNU/Linux, and most of the rest are transforming into something called systemd/Linux. Sure, that's a bit of an overblown gripe now, but with systemd busy replacing every userspace service, it probably won't be for long.
Right now if you run systemd it might only change your init system, but it's going to replace a lot more, and odds are, given its history, that a lot of that won't be optional.
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @02:18AM
Since when was "GNU" a synonym for "SysV UNIX"?
(Score: 2) by novak on Monday December 22 2014, @02:36AM
Never. The same amount of time that systemd was only an init system.
novak