What breakage does this actually fix?

Posted Jun 8, 2016 11:21 UTC (Wed) by matthias (subscriber, #94967)
In reply to: What breakage does this actually fix? by NAR
Parent article: Distributors ponder a systemd change

I had this problem in university pools. While a user is logged in, there is no problem. When the user notices that the desktop is too slow, the user can kill his own process. The problem occurs, when such a process is left after logout. The behaviour of killing all processes that are not ment to survive seems very reasonable.

And asking that the administrator should do the job of session management seems like a joke to me. It is enough work when the administrator has to react to a user doing malicious things on purpose.

I expect that the usual tools for having background processes are changed before this change hits stable distributions. Before that, disabling the feature is a reasonable choice. tmux and screen could need proper session management (using PAM) anyway (e.g., to avoid that the ssh-agent gets terminated when the user logs out). The current behaviour looks broken even without the systemd change. PAM will do the necessary things to avoid systemd killing the tmux/screen session in this case. I do not see a problem, when a distribution, which uses systemd as PID 1, needs a version of nohup that is linked against libsystemd.

Once theese changes are in place, the distributions can enable the feature again.

What breakage does this actually fix?

Posted Jun 8, 2016 13:18 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

I thought those kind of pools went out of fashion long time ago, nowadays university students carry computing devices much stronger than those computers at the pools I used to use... The setting makes some sense in this environment, but I don't think this is the default. Anyway, even in this setting I might prefer to shutdown the computer after logout and boot before login in order to save power (systemd is supposed to make it faster). And this setup does need good monitoring tools to avoid the students running servers there.