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Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

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Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#411
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, the fix for pulseaudio was to throw it away entirely for systemd, I don't think I have a single linux system that boots/reboots reliably 100% of the time these days

The trick is the same: use a popular linux distribution and don't fight the kinks. The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way. SystemD is very opinionated, so you'd assume it wouldn't have the same results, but it does.. if you use a popular distro then they've done a lot of the hard work t…

> The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way.

Incorrect. I used mainstream distro, still had issues, that just solved itself moving to pipewire. Issues like it literally crashing or emitting spur of max volume noise once every few months for no discernable reason.

Pulseaudio also completely denies existence of people trying to do music on Linux, there is no real way to make latency on it be good.

> SystemD is very opinionated, so you'd assume it wouldn't have the same results, but it does.. if you use a popular distro then they've done a lot of the hard work that makes systemd function smooth.

Over the years of using the "opinion" of SystemD seems to be "if it is not problem on Lennart's laptop, it's not a real problem and it can be closed or ignored completely".

For example systemd have no real method to tell it "turn off all apps after 5 minutes regardless of what silly package maintainers think". Now what happens if you have a server on UPS that have say 5 minutes of battery and one of the apps have some problem and doesn't want to close?

In SysV, it gets killed, and system gets remounted read only. You have app crash recovery but at least your filesystem is clean In systemd ? No option to do that. You can set default timeout but it can be override in each service so you'd have to audit every single package and tune it to achieve that. That was one bug that was closed.

Same problem also surfaced if you have say app with a bug that prevented it from closing from sigterm and you wanted to reboot a machine. Completely stuck

But wait, there is another method, systemd have an override, you can press (IIRC) ctrl+alt+delete 7 times within 2 seconds to force it to restart ( which already confuses some people that expect it to just restart machine clean(ish) regardless https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11285 ).

...which is also impossible if your only method of access is software KVM where you need to navigate to menu to send ctrl+alt+del. So I made ticket with proposal to just make it configurable timeout for the CAD ( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/29616 ), the ticket wasn't even read completely because Mr. Poettering said "this is not actionable, give a proposal", so I pasted the thing he decided to ignore in original ticket, and got ignored. Not even "pull requests welcome" (which I'd be fine with, I just wanted confirmation that the feature like that won't be rejected if I start writing it).

There is also issue of journald disk format being utter piece of garbage ("go thru entire journal just to get app's last few lines bad", hundreds of disk reads on simple systemctl status bad) that is consistently ignored thru many tickets from different people.

Or the issue that resolvconf replacement in systemd will just roll a dice on DNS ordering, but hey, Mr. Lennart doesn't use openvpn so it's not real issue ( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/27543 )

I'm not writing it to shit on systemd and praise what was before, as a piece of software it's very useful for my job as sysadmin (we literally took tens of thousands lines of fixed init scripts out because all of the features could be achieved in unit files) and I mean "saved tons of time and few demons running" in some cases, but Mr. Poettering is showing same ignorant "I know better" attitude he got scolded at by kernel maintainers.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secure Boot only extends the chain of trust from your firmware down the first UEFI binary it loads. Currently SB is effectively useless because it will at best authenticate your kernel but the initrd and subsequent userspace (including programs that run as root) are unverified and can be replaced by malicious alternatives. Secure Boot as it stands right now in the Linux world is effectively an annoyance that’s only t…

here is some actual security: encrypted /boot, encrypted everything other than the boot loader (grub in this case) sign grub with your own keys (some motherboards let you to do so). don't let random things signed by microsoft to boot (it defeats the whole point) so you have grub in an efi partition, it passes secure boot, loads, and attempts to unlock a luks partition with the user provided passphrase. if it passed s…

I’d much rather have tamper detection. Encryption is great should the device is stolen but it feels like the wrong tool for defending against evil maids. All I’d want is that any time you open the case or touch the cold external ports (ie unbolted) you have to re-authenticate with a master password. I’m happy to use cabled peripherals to achieve this.

Chaining trust from POST to login feels like trying to make a theoretically perfect diamond and titanium bicycle that never wears down or falls apart when all I need is an automated system to tell me when to replace a part that’s about to fail.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, the fix for pulseaudio was to throw it away entirely for systemd, I don't think I have a single linux system that boots/reboots reliably 100% of the time these days

There were dozens of other init systems that, like systemd, wasn't a shell script. What set systemd apart is the collection of tightly integrated utilities such as a dns resolver, sntp client, core dump handler, rpc-like api linking to complex libraries in the hot path and so on and so forth that has been a constant stream of security exploits for over a decade now. This is a case where the critics were proven to be…

that on itself is not a problem. The problem is that those work worse.

For example, the part of systemd that fills DNS will put them in random order (like actual random, not "code happened to dump it in map order)

The previous, while very much NOT perfect, system, put the DNSes in order of one in latest interface, which had useful side-feature that if your VPN had different set of DNSes, it got added in front

The systemd one just randomizes it ( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/27543 ) which means that using standard openvpn wrapper script for it will need to be reran sometimes few times to "roll" the right address, I pretty much have to run

     systemctl restart systemd-resolved ; sleep 1 ; cat /etc/resolv.conf
half of the time I connect to company's VPN

The OTHER problem is pervasive NIH in codebase.

Like, they decided to use binary log format. Okay, I can see advantages, it can be indexed or sharded for faster access to app's files...

oh wait it isn't, if you want to get last few lines of a service the worst case is "mmap every single journal file for hundreds of MBs of reads"

It can be optimized so some long but constant fields like bootid are not repeated...

oh wait it doesn't do that either, is massively verbose. I guess I can understand it, at least that would make it less crash-proof...

oh wait no, after crash it just spams logs that previous log file is corrupted and it won't be used.

So we have a log format that only systemd tools can read, takes few times as much space per line as text or even JSON version would, and it still craps out on unclean shutdown

They could've just integrated SQLite. Hell I literally made a lil prototype that took journalctl logs and wrote it to indexed SQLite file and it was not only faster but smaller (as there is no need to write bootid with each line, and log lines can be sharded or indexed so lookup is faster). But nah, Mr. Poettering always wanted to make a binary log format so he did.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#415

Ah, good old remote attestation. Always works out brilliantly. I have this fond memory of that Notary in Germany who did a remote attestation of me being with him in the same room, voting on a shareholder resolution. While I was currently traveling on the other side of the planet. This great concept that totally will not blow up the planet has been proudly brought to you by Ze Germans. No matter what your intentions…

no no, let him get distracted by it, the one thing that happened after he got bored with pulseaudio is that pulseaudio started being better.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like kernel mode DRM or some similarly unwanted bullshit. Look, I hate systemd just as much as the next guy - but how are you getting "DRM" out of this?

As the immediate responder to this comment, I claim to be the next guy. I love systemd.

I don't like few pieces and Mr. Lennarts attitude to some bugs/obvious flaws, but by far much better than old sysv or really any alternative we have.

Doing complex flows like "run app to load keys from remote server to unlock encrypted partition" is far easier under systemd and it have dependency system robust enough to trigger that mount automatically if app needing it starts

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to not implement remote attestation even when you implement secure boot. This company is explicitly all about implementing remote attestation (which is a form of DRM): https://amutable.com/events > Remote Attestation of Imutable Operating Systems built on systemd > Lennart Poettering

> This company is explicitly all about implementing remote attestation (which is a form of DRM): Is there a HN full moon out? Again, this is wrong. DRM is a policy. Remote attestation is a technology. You can use remote attestation to implement DRM. You can also use remote attestation to implement other things.

there are no other things. The entire point of remote attestation is to manage(i.e. take away) rights of user that runs it, unless you own entire chain, which you do not on any customer device

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#419
post #46

The typical HN rage-posting about DRM aside, there's no reason that remote attestation can't be used in the opposite direction: to assert that a server is running only the exact code stack it claims to be, avoiding backdoors. This can even be used with fully open-source software, creating an opportunity for OSS cloud-hosted services which can guarantee that the OSS and the build running on the server match. This is a…

it doesn't stop remote code injection. Protecting boot path is frankly hardly relevant on server compared to actual threats.

You will get 10000 zero days before you get a single direct attack at hardware

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#420
post #355
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the parent commenter is completely right. The attestation portion of those systems is happening on locked down devices, and if you gain ownership of the devices they no longer attest themselves. This is the curse of the duopoly of iOS and Android. BankID in Sweden will only run with one of these devices, they used to offer a card system but getting one seems to be impossible these days. So you're really…

as you say, a lot of this stuff is already happening. Won’t it be good to have a FOSS attestation stack that breaks the iOS/android duopoly?

It would but how and who to run it? Ideally some one like Linux Foundation sits on the White house meetings or EU meetings. But they don't. Govts don't understand. I was once participating in a Youth meeting with MEPs - most of them have only iPhones. Most (not all) lawmakers live on a different planet.

Also IIRC, linux foundation etc are not interested in doing such standardisations.

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