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For me it was the fact that it mounts efivarfs read/write which can lead to accidentally bricking your computer, and Pottering's response when concerns were rai

For me it was the fact that it mounts efivarfs read/write which can lead to accidentally bricking your computer, and Pottering's response when concerns were raised was the typically dismissive "we know best" reply which seems to be the standard line of thinking behind systemd. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402

ars 10y ago
That is an extraordinarily inaccurate summary of that situation!! Is that really what you got from that? If so you need to do a much better job of understanding what you read.
kbenson 10y ago
This was covered in detail here[1], and much of what set people into different camps on the issue is how they interpreted what he said. This was somewhat resolved later, when it was patched in the kernel[2]. My interpretation, for an alternative take, was that Lennart acknowledged it was a problem and should be secured, but noted that there were tools that needed read-write access, so it wasn't as simple as just mounting read-only. He did note how you could mitigate the problem using fstab, but I think a lot of people took his statement that you could do so as the official response and that no fix would be forthcoming, when nothing of the sort was said. In fact, that comment, even though separate from the prior one, had its text encapsulated in parenthesis, which I take as an attempt to indicate it's something he forgot to include in his prior response, and just an addition, so not the definitive answer from the developers on the "solution". Note, the eventual fix to the problem was at a kernel level, not systemd, because systemd didn't design efivarfs, they just use the accepted mechanism for accessing EFI variables on linux, which happens to be a filesystem. Whether you think that's a good choice for an interface or not, or think it was poorly thought out and implemented even if it is a good choice, none of those things have to do with systemd or Lennart, since they are kernel level issues. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999335 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11152880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11152880
Fej 10y ago
Holy crap. I previously thought most of the negativity over systemd was bluster, but this changes that. What the actual fuck?!

ars 10y ago

That is an extraordinarily inaccurate summary of that situation!! Is that really what you got from that? If so you need to do a much better job of understanding what you read.

kbenson 10y ago

This was covered in detail here[1], and much of what set people into different camps on the issue is how they interpreted what he said. This was somewhat resolved later, when it was patched in the kernel[2]. My interpretation, for an alternative take, was that Lennart acknowledged it was a problem and should be secured, but noted that there were tools that needed read-write access, so it wasn't as simple as just mounting read-only. He did note how you could mitigate the problem using fstab, but I think a lot of people took his statement that you could do so as the official response and that no fix would be forthcoming, when nothing of the sort was said. In fact, that comment, even though separate from the prior one, had its text encapsulated in parenthesis, which I take as an attempt to indicate it's something he forgot to include in his prior response, and just an addition, so not the definitive answer from the developers on the "solution". Note, the eventual fix to the problem was at a kernel level, not systemd, because systemd didn't design efivarfs, they just use the accepted mechanism for accessing EFI variables on linux, which happens to be a filesystem. Whether you think that's a good choice for an interface or not, or think it was poorly thought out and implemented even if it is a good choice, none of those things have to do with systemd or Lennart, since they are kernel level issues. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999335 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11152880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11152880

Fej 10y ago

Holy crap. I previously thought most of the negativity over systemd was bluster, but this changes that. What the actual fuck?!