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Multiple Linux Distributions Affected By Crippling Bug In Systemd (agwa.name)
An anonymous reader writes: System administrator Andrew Ayer has discovered a potentially critical bug in systemd which can bring a vulnerable Linux server to its knees with one command. "After running this command, PID 1 is hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system." According to the bug report, Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS are among the distros susceptible to various levels of resource exhaustion. The bug, which has existed for more than two years, does not require root access to exploit.
All the people that were telling you that this init system called Systemd was overly complex, unaudited and insecure had warned you that this was coming. All the "Troll -1" modding on people that posted such warning here did not prevent the inevitable.
Not convinced? Here's a graph of the number of issues opened/closed since systemd moved to github last year.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I see where you are coming from and, yes, it's disingenuous for me to imply that all that code is running in PID 1. It's certainly not. But, my point is that systemd is gigantic because it has started to absorb other fundamental parts of the userland. And so those parts are now heavily reliant on PID 1 or a very near descendant. Instead of layers of software being built on more fundamental layers of software, you now have a nasty web of dependencies that will, in time, become unmaintainable.
We grey beards didn't do it how we did it for fun. We did it because once one layer of the system worked, we stopped caring about it and moved to the next layer. Systemd is compressing all the layers into a single, nasty web of interdependent processes that represent a single layer. The complexity of it *will* overwhelm the stability of it. It's just a matter of when.