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posted by LaminatorX on Monday December 22 2014, @02:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the Man-what? dept.

As long time SoylentNews community member Marand observed during some recent discussion of severe systemd boot problems, it turns out that systemd disables the magic SysRq key.

The magic SysReq key is described at Wikipedia as:

[...] a key combination understood by the Linux kernel, which allows the user to perform various low-level commands regardless of the system's state. It is often used to recover from freezes, or to reboot a computer without corrupting the filesystem.

A Fedora user who logged a bug report for this issue back in 2013 described the problem with systemd's unexpected and harmful default setting:

As systemd depends on many files on a rootfs, in case of any problems with rootfs, it is not able to do its basic function - control processes and (cleanly) shutdown/reboot when crtl-alt-del is pressed on local keyboard. As this is a feature, I'd like to ask to enable the sysrq by default on Fedora, otherwise it is not possible to reboot system even locally in case of emergency situation.

While that Fedora bug report is set to CLOSED NOTABUG, other Linux distros, like Mageia and Debian GNU/Linux, have restored the proper behavior.

Now that this problem has come to light, all Fedora users should evaluate whether or not they need to fix their systems to work around systemd's incorrect default setting. Users of other Linux distributions using systemd should also evaluate their systems, too, in case their distro has not yet fixed this unexpected bug.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @07:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @07:14AM (#128246)

    Sadly he see himself as "just" the kernel guy.

    Also, his distro of choice is Fedora. The very Fedora where Systemd has slowly been bloating itself.

    And the last time he voiced an opinion about Fedora user space, polkit requiring root password to change a wifi setting, it got fixed asap.

    All in all, i don't think it has bitten him personally yet...

  • (Score: 0) by SDRefugee on Monday December 22 2014, @04:03PM

    by SDRefugee (4477) on Monday December 22 2014, @04:03PM (#128363)

    I'm betting the abortion that is systemd just hasn't gotten around to biting him in the ass yet... If he uses Fedora, he's already deep into it.. Once he gets screwed by it, you can BET we'll hear about it.. And I DARE any of the systemd fanbois to accuse Linus of any of their favorite excuses.... I look forward to hearing Linus blasting the abortion that IS systemd... I have NO doubt it WILL happen... I've used Linux since 1995, started with Slackware, and frankly, I'm looking into going BACK to it, due to all of my favorite distros (Debian/CentOS) shoving this abortion down their users throats.. I strongly suspect Pat V. isn't gonna go down THAT road....

    --
    America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..