In light of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage/disaster that has been wreaking havoc on corporate Windows systems around the world since Friday, systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering pointed out how such a situation on Linux systems could be averted by leveraging systemd’s Automatic Boot Assessment functionality.

System’s Automatic Boot Assessment feature can allow for reverting to a previous version of the OS or kernel automatically when a system consistently fails to boot. With the systemd-boot bootloader and related tooling within systemd and leveraging the Boot Loader Specification, systemd Automatic Boot Assessment would make for much easier recovery in case of an incident like what happened with Microsoft Windows systems running CrowdStrike software last week.

  • John Richard@lemmy.world
    01·
    4 months ago

    Lennart Poettering is no doubt smart, but learning all the ins and outs of systemd with terrible documentation and half-baked solutions, and just “trusting” it to do everything from UEFI booting, immutable partitions, system imaging, networking, home directory and resource management, init and daemon processes, sockets, etc. using “INI-like” files… hmm, I’d almost prefer another global outage.

      • John Richard@lemmy.world
        01·
        4 months ago

        Sysv didn’t have to have a lot of documentation. It was simple to understand what it did, and the underlying system was mostly shell scripting. It didn’t try to be and do everything.

        I don’t hate systemd. I prefer it now for the most part. I really do think Lennart Poettering is incredibly skilled and intelligent. I am just frustrated that so much gets pushed without adequate resources and support to weigh what is production-ready, and what is bleeding edge. I’ve already had systemd bite me in the ass at least once where they made a significant unannounced change to systemd-cryptsetup. I had to go find answers by reading through pull request and GitHub issue comments, and it wasn’t easy to find either. The community acted like it wasn’t a big deal that it caused systems to no longer boot. Move fast & break things isn’t the message that will win over larger companies.