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 jelizondo on Monday December 22 2014, @03:53AM
I been wondering, why all major (almost all, anyway) Linux distros changed to systemd?
I'll give you my conspiracy theory: some key people in there are being funded my Microsoft!
When your upgrade is as iffy as a Windows upgrade, you have to concede that someone from *that* camp has crossed over and messed things up.
Maybe it is non-sense, but I really wonder why stable distros have choosen uncertainty and chaos when the bedrock foundation of Linux was robustness; not ease of use or click-next to install, but rock solid performance year after year. Why?
If someone knows why, please share with the unwashed...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @11:18AM
They should be found and beaten. BEATEN.