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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @03:25PM
This is beginning to annoy me. You guys/gals have not done your research. I am using, and have been using, on about 6 or 7 machines, and for a good few years, Salix: a Slackware derivative, which has a built in package manager - slapt-get, and if it isn't in that repository you can use Sourcery or spi for slapt-src which will build anything in a SlackBuild repository (similar to Gentoo). I suspect the issue is here that many are not prepared to learn new things on either side of the debate. Slackware is a damn sight easier to configure than Ubuntu, Redhat and Debian IMHO. I have tried all these and have always had problems with nis, nis+ remote nfs, ldap, etc. and invariably return to Slacking. Slack is rock solid, stable and EASY. Saying that though, if Slack gets the Systemd virus, then I will myself be moving to a *BSD. but I have been using Slack since 96 and so hope I never have to so. Other than my long history with Slack, it is also seems to be the case that device drivers are just nowhere near as comprehensive in the *BSD. However, one good side-effect of the Systemd debacle, is that this will probably change in the next few years, as more of us move over.