Mastodawn

Lennart Poettering Jul 20, 2024

So, if you ask me what my takeaway from the Crowdstrike issue is, I'd say: boot counting/boot assessment/automatic fallback should really be a MUST for today's systems. *Before* you invoke your first kernel you need have tracking of boot attempts and a logic for falling back to older versions automatically. It's a major shortcoming that this is not default behaviour of today's distros, in particular commercial ones.

Of course systemd has supported this for a long time:

https://systemd.io/AUTOMATIC_BOOT_ASSESSMENT/

Automatic Boot Assessment

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vurpo 🏳️‍⚧️ (2869)Jul 20, 2024

@pid_eins unfortunately this wasn't the kind of issue that would be solved by falling back to old versions. The bug in the kernel module was there for a long time or possibly from the beginning, and falling back to an older version would still just have crashed in the same way

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Lennart Poettering

@vurpo nope, of course boot assessment would catch this. Key is just that you "pin" enough as part of an attempt, and thus can revert sufficient parts to get things working.

On Linux you'd pin kernel *and* initrd at the very leas, and in the model i propose even the entire /usr for each attempt, to maximize coverage of the assesment logic.