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.
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.
Because documentation was so great for sysv and everything else back in the day…
If you wanted documentation, you read the init scripts.
The “self-documenting” crowd is back in boys.