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 jackb_guppy on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:05PM
At this point Slackware is not "Linux". Linux is kernel. "Linux" now is Debian and Redhat with systemd and the trash it brings.
"Linux" is not longer an inclusive set of functions that make system. There was a day, that "Linux", I could use any old piece of equipment and it would work and run. Windows keep dropping support and abandoning old equipment. Now "Linux" with g++/gcc can no longer be ran on a 128MB machine. It does not use the swap space - IT MUST BE FULLY IN MEMORY to work. How stupid!
And about PID 1, another poor stupid design. I can PID 1 as an old design from year days, but today, PID should be any random value, instead of lazy programming trick. Future with any PID allows and multiple entres on multiple PIDs, so systemd is not another parallel "OS/Kernel" with multiple modules directly linked to itself.
Where is the elegance in program design? Plans for security? The benefits of "Linux" of old?
Damn old MS is everywhere! Now we call it Redhat and Debian.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:43PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Funny) by FatPhil on Sunday December 21 2014, @11:35PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @11:12AM
And Linus, the fuck, is totally onboard.
FUCK him. He betrayed us.