[systemd-devel] Cannot use systemctl after heavy swapping

[Jan Janssen]

On 2014-11-14 16:06, Michal Schmidt wrote:
> On 11/14/2014 03:20 PM, Jan Janssen wrote:
>> I think there might be something wrong with how the rate limiting
>> works in manager.c. Just recently, firefox went nuts and got the
>> whole system swapping like crazy. After manual OOM killing, the
>> system is back to normal, but I can't seem to do any service
>> management with systemctl afterwards.
>>
>> A simple "sudo systemctl start systemd-timedated.service" will hang
>> forever. While the journal keeps getting this message about every
>> second: systemd[1]: Looping too fast. Throttling execution a little.
>> while other systemctl actions tend to time out (status, for
>> example).
>
> Hi,
> are you able to trigger the problem again at will? I'd love to have
> a reproducer for this. There've been occasional reports of seeing the
> "Looping too fast" message before.
>
>> Interestingly, if I don't use sudo (and instead rely on polkit),
>> everything seems to work as expected and I can get things started.
>
> This suggests that PID1's confusion is affecting the private DBus
> socket (/run/systemd/private), but its connection to the system bus
> is still working.
>
>> This is all on systemd 217 on up-to-date Arch.
>
> Regards,
> Michal
>

Well, I can try tomorrow, but I'll need something that will get the 
system into a swapping frenzy that pretty much freezes the system.

I've just noticed that sometimes the "systemctl start" does also time 
out. But if it does hang forever and I kill it, systemd decides to 
actually do start the service.

Jan