[systemd-bugs] [Bug 76418] systemd unusable after segfault, zombies everywhere, unable to shutdown

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76418

Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|---                         |WONTFIX

--- Comment #3 from Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> ---
There's no reason really to second guess the admin. If the admin sends SIGSEGV
to PID 1 that's hardly any better than let's say connecting /dev/urandom with
/dev/mem... The admin has myriads of ways to bring the system to a standstill,
anyway, SIGSEGV is just one of them.

Sending SIGSEGV as admin doesn't happen by accident. From systemd's perspective
it's when PID 1 actually crashed, and in that case things are fucked really, we
cannot recover from that (simply because the kernel doesn't allow us to "eat
up" sigsegv, it will always cause a kernel oops, either immediately or when we
try to exec() a new binary.

Note that sysvinit is only marginally better at that. Sure you can still invoke
a service or two, since that's indepndent of the init process, but you cannot
shutdown or anything else anymore.

The simple summary is that the system is fucked, and we should try hard to fix
the reasons in systemd/PID 1 so that this never really happens.

In a way, this isn't any different from making the kernel oops. Thankfully
though systemd is vastly simpler than the kernel and knows no loadable
extensions, so things are much easier for us.

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