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: 2) by tonyPick on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:34AM
I think we can all agree that whether SystemD is a good thing or not, it is designed to do init-type tasks.
Much as I've been avoiding this discussion this time around... Several people would disagree with you, and one of those people is Poeterring:
It's not just an init system anymore, but the basic userspace building block to build an OS from
From http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html [0pointer.de]
See also: http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html [0pointer.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:45AM
How do you go from "It's not just an init system anymore" to "it is not designed to do init-type tasks"?
Even if "it's not just an init system anymore" it's still an init system.