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Systemd Starts Killing Your Background Processes By Default (blog.fefe.de)
New submitter nautsch writes: systemd changed a default value in logind.conf to "yes", which will kill all your processes, when you log out... There is already a bug-report over at debian: Debian bug tracker.
The new change means "user sessions will be properly cleaned up after," according to the changelog, "but additional steps are necessary to allow intentionally long-running processes to survive logout. To effectively allow users to run long-term tasks even if they are logged out, lingering must be enabled for them."
The new change means "user sessions will be properly cleaned up after," according to the changelog, "but additional steps are necessary to allow intentionally long-running processes to survive logout. To effectively allow users to run long-term tasks even if they are logged out, lingering must be enabled for them."
"user sessions will be properly and improperly cleaned up after..."
FTFY.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So, "screen" has always been a good way to ensure that processes don't get killed randomly by disconnections, logout or X crashes.
Then comes systemd and kills all your processes at logout, even when launched with screen.
Finally, then comes Poettering, explaining you that you're a moron if you expect to keep those processes running.
Seriously, the systemd devs make it really hard no to hate them.
Fear not, people of Slashdot, because there is an option to maintain background processes, even after user disconnection.
But this option is not "on" by default. So, yeah, screen and tmux all of a sudden become useless, unless you fiddle with the knobs.
Seriously, now, fsck systemd: Slackware and OpenBSD for me from now on.
Even Mac OS X has the decency not to mess up your tmux sessions when suspending and restoring your session. Fsck systemd.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
> A multi-user system shouldn't allow unpriviledged users from consuming resources indefinitely
You're an idiot.
If I log on and start vim and two weeks later I've still got that screen sesh up, I sure as fuck do not want my unpriviledged account to have its processes terminate.
Docking/shutdown makes sense. You've turned off that (conceptual) computation device. But that requires the end user to say they're done and shut down. Doing it automatically is incredibly fucking stupid.
Because for most linux is not a desktop os, we use it one servers. I've had logged in screen sessions that date back to when machines were built. Systemd keep thinking that people want it for a desktop os, for their laptop etc. I've got literally thousands of physical boxes running linux that I deal with I've only got one linux laptop so the laptop scenario should never be the default for me, the systemd devs seem to keep thinking their linux laptops are the majority.
No sir I dont like it.
Again and again I've heard people like you suggest that Slackware is a replacement for a modern mainstream distro like Debian. Others suggest Gentoo.
Well, the reality is that neither is sufficient.
Slackware is, to put it politely, very primitive. While simplicity is a good thing, Slackware takes it to the point where it becomes a liability.
When using Debian, it's possible to get a full-featured desktop or server set up with very little effort, and this can be done quickly. Thanks to sensible defaults and a practical installer, manual configuration is kept to a minimum.
Slackware, on the other hand, requires far too much manual intervention just to get a minimally usable system set up. Maybe this isn't a problem for a hobbyist who tinkers with Linux on a weekend, but it is a problem for people who are seriously using Linux, especially in a business setting. They can't afford to waste time and effort on Slackware, especially if a distro like Debian manages to avoid such waste.
Gentoo really isn't much better. It's not as bad as Slackware, but Gentoo is still a niche distro, and its whole compilation strategy is wasteful for anyone but hobbyists.
At this point, sensible and experienced Debian users have realized that Debian systemd/GNU/Linux is a lost cause. They've moved to FreeBSD ages ago, or are in the process of doing so. If Slackware and Gentoo are the only viable non-systemd options left for those who want to use Linux, then Linux is just not suitable for use.
FreeBSD gives much of what Debian used to give: stability, reliability, trustworthiness, an excellent packaging system, a superb installer, sensible defaults, no systemd, and an environment that's perfect for both desktops and servers. In some ways FreeBSD is even better than Debian traditionally was: much of the FreeBSD code is released under truly free BSD family licenses, rather than the far more restrictive and less-free GPL family.
you should explicitly state so
nohup
What about when I have a long running process I need to run and I don't want it to be stopped if I get disconnected from wifi? Or maybe I know it'll still be running when I have to go home?
The way it is now, if I just disconnect from ssh, they get killed. If i go out of my way to ensure they won't (e.g. start them in a screen session) then they aren't. How is the old way a problem?
No, it wouldn't be. First, if you will contemplate what is involved in saving state, you'll realize what an incredible challenge it would be to do so perfectly every time in every case.
For example, if I start a slow FTP session, how will the magic state saver cope? Remember, the remote server is not taking part in the state saving.
Second, had you done that, wouldn't you be a bit disappointed to find out 24 hours later that the file transfer has made no progress at all?
Screen, nohup, and friends exist explicitly to allow a terminal session to dettach and re-attach as needed. I use screen all the time, especially where a firewall might time out.
It's probably best for the system to work like it's always worked. If they want Potterix to work differently, they should put out a distro.
Apparently, according to some reports, this came about because Gnome can't properly kill off all your sub processes when you log out.
So, systemd to the rescue. Why is anyone using gnome again?!
How is the old way a problem?
That's systemd in a nutshell (and pulseaudio too). Replace well-known things that are not broken with something obscure and clunky that thinks it's smarter than you.
systemd, unity, iTunes, Windows 10... We live in a world where mediocre aspies decide how other people should use their computers because they work in large footprint organizations that have no competent dictators.
lucm, indeed.
This is anti-daemonic. Systemd is committing daemon genocide while you log out and turn your back on it.
Changes like this make me wonder if the systemd developers even use Linux beyond their local development workstations. This isn't just an inconvenient change, it breaks the expected and decades old behavior of how Unix machines work. This breaks ^Z/bg/disown, it breaks screen, it breaks nohup, etc. Yes, these things can be made to work still but, why do I need to jump through hoops to re-gain the functionality I've relied on for decades? If I'm not aware of this change, how would I even figure out why all my screen sessions died when I logged out? What benefits am I gaining by having this be the default behavior?
One of the best things on linux is screen. I can start a long calculation, compile, transcode, whatever, log out, drive home, and pick up where I left off. Let the computer work while I drive: there's no reason for it to be stuck in traffic, too.
Even with the new settings, no user process will be killed on exit/logout if the user have told the system not to.
Instead of starting the program with with "nohup" you start it with "systemd-run" instead.
Yes. The issue isn't that it can't be done. The issue is that longstanding default behavior has changed. Since it appears that there's no good, solid reason for the change, people are objecting to it. Change for change's sake is bad.
Not sure why the GP was marked as troll, it stated the problem very clearly, and the parent of this, nohup response is a very good, perhaps best response. You should NOT leave user processes active post logout unless they are specifically declared as such,
Here's the problem with your idea. These processes are already killed when you log out if you haven't done something to detach them from their PPID. That's already the default. Now the problem is that systemd will kill even processes you have done that to, unless you reconfigure systemd. That is not arduous, but changing the default behavior should not be the default. I am Jack's total lack of surprise that the systemd developers would change default behavior, since that's what they have been up to all along. I am also unsurprised that many slashdotters who lack perspective are willing to share their utterly worthless opinions with the rest of us. It's not that these guys are trying to make improvements that rankles. It's the slipshod quality of their efforts, and their arrogant insistence that they know better than the giants of computing history that figured this stuff out to begin with. They put together an extremely compelling system that we are still using, knocking off, and reinventing decades later, and these systemd tools are sure that they were a bunch of morons.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Basically systemd is built on a totally fucked up concept - a concept in which whatever the users do is not important, only system resources count, and if the users do not like it, they can go fuck themselves
That is basically what systemd is - and it perfectly reflects the way systemd's proponents think as well
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
For me, it's not so much the poor quality; it's the poor quality, the arrogant/wontfix response to bugs, the 'adapt to us' attitude, the strawmen arguments, the ties to GNOME (quickly becoming its own shitheap), the idiotic assumptions and bad practices that throw out decades of learning and experience...and the fact that, despite all this, it's still being adopted.
Well, maybe because if you read the linked thread you'd see that screen/tmux/nohup/etc. are all affected by this idiotic change. Never liked the systemd philosophy, and their attitude even less, and such changes certainly won't make me like them.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
How about doing anything that takes a long time and you don't want to remain logged in for it to complete? For example you are running a standard program that is going to take hours or even days to process some data, so you redirect stdin to /dev/null, stdout to one file, stderr to either the same file or another file, and you start the whole thing with the nohup shell command.
There is already a well established mechanism for cleaning up background processes, i.e. the SIGHUP signal. And there is already a mechanism for explicitly stating that you don't want a process to die when you log out, and that is the shell's "nohup" command (which blocks the hangup signal that is sent to the process when the user exits).
And in what way does this new mechanism "enhance security"? Running something in the background after you log out doesn't give you any more privileges than if you remained logged in.
Why do the systemd folks think they need to keep reinventing the wheel? This feels like a solution in search of a problem.
Not sure why the GP was marked as troll, it stated the problem very clearly, and the parent of this, nohup response is a very good, perhaps best response.
Exactly.
You should NOT leave user processes active post logout unless they are specifically declared as such,
the ampersand *is* the specific declaration that you want the process to be active post logout, otherwise it does not survive the termination of the login session.
and even then there is room for argument that allowing a USER , not admin level process to run in absence of the user is bad practice.
Not at all. I have processes to run that are processing information when I leave to go home and I want to check it the next day when it has finished. If I did not have that option then my user session would have to remain logged in and that *is* recognized as bad security practice.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.