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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: 2) by novak on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:20AM

    by novak (4683) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:20AM (#128625) Homepage

    Yeah, I didn't mean to say that systemd isn't a problem, so much as help people avoid it. I have a whole lot invested in linux and if it's going to split into minimalist and systemd factions, I'll do my best to help those on the minimal side. I will probably start using BSD entirely for servers, but for embedded, desktop, and HPC I get a lot of mileage out of linux. I'm not going to be forced out by anyone, and especially not some redhat jokers.

    Systemd's infection is indeed deep, and if just a couple more distros go then nearly all will require systemd, or be derived from one that does (What's even left that people know? Maybe puppy, PCLinuxOS, and slackware?). The vast majority are already gone, and though I do hope that some deriving from debian try to stand up against it, I have no doubt that will prove increasingly difficult.

    --
    novak
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