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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:21PM
> Rare bugs aren't less important. They're just as important as any other bug.
That is only true in a world in which the developers have infinite resources.
Since they don't, it ain't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:28PM
Right, so it makes sense that the systemd bugs mentioned recently haven't been fixed immediately. But why are some of them taking years to be fixed?
If Red Hat and whoever else is pushing this systemd crap doesn't have the resources to do the job properly, then they just couldn't do it at all.
It's better for us not to have systemd at all, then it is for us to have our systems trashed repeatedly by systemd bugs like these.