Poettering: The Biggest Myths

That's not a problem that can happen with systemd though, since it keeps the services on a tight leash and knows what state (running or not) the service is in. Since that part must be self-contained in PID 1 it would seem there is little room for race conditions or errors to exist.

If we had the time we could skim through http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/src/core/ and see if we can identify where it keeps that state and how it is updated to see if there are any bugs.