The "sysvinit" binary package has had a total of 2 bug reports tagged "security" filed in Debian's bug tracker. That's over the entire history of the package that goes back to at least 2004.

If I extend the search to all packages built from the "sysvinit" source (which includes packages like initscripts and sysvinit-utils), the count increases to 8.

(source: https://www.debian.org/Bugs. I'm not linking to exact queries since they take quite some time and HN has a tendency of taking down Debian's bug tracker)

van Smoorenburg init dates from 1992. Considering its bug history from age 12 to age 25 and comparing that to systemd's bug history from age 5 to age 6 is at the very best misleading.

At age 4, van Smoorenburg init was panicking when /etc/inittab had blank lines. At age 6, van Smoorenburg init was having a buffer overflow in init.c fixed.

Counting the CVE bugs is a silly approach. It is far better to look at the coding practices that are followed in a project. Are APIs designed and implemented consistently? When a functional change is made, is the doco always changed at the same time to match? Are the reasons for seemingly odd things properly recorded for maintenance programmers in the future to read? There are many, far better, questions to ask in place of how many CVE listings something has had in some arbitrary interval in its lifetime.

Why is it misleading? Why if we had something safe and stable because of its age and refinement is that an excuse to stuff something less mature in its place?

Personally I like unit files rather than bespoke Bash scripts, I like dependency-driven parallel startup, and I like getting a daemon watchdog for free. That's about where I'd have ended the feature requests, though. I'd also like it to be roughly as secure as what it's replacing.

For the reasons given. Read again, properly. Pay particular attention to the statement that counting CVE listings is a silly approach. Then think, and consider that if that alone is silly, what must counting two sets of CVE listings from entirely different parts of two projects' lifetimes be.

Then read on a find a whole lot of better questions to ask. For bonus points, try asking yourself them about various systems. (-:

OpenRC (and to some extent, the BSDs), already have dep-driven startup, and OpenRC supports parallel startup. Also, with rc.subrs and whatever OpenRC calls it, the init files can be pretty damn descriptive, and very concise.

so if Vsinit is stable and bug free right now, why switch to something that isn't?

Also, systemd has had two bad exoploits over the course of about a year. The flaws in Vsinit you point out were two years apart, and the former of the two could only be triggered by someone who was already an admin, and gave no opportunity for privesc.

Given, init panicking is never acceptable, but it's a heck of a lot better than what systemd did.

Anyone who erroneously thinks that van Smoorenburg rc is bug free hasn't spent time fixing the whole host of faulty, incomplete, and rickety van Smoorenburg rc scripts that exist.

It is also erroneous to propound the old There Is Only System 5 init And systemd fallacy, which is just bunkum.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13477512

I'm well aware there are other inits: OpenRC, BSDinit, Runit, s6/s6-rc, and many others are all better alternatives to both sysvinit and systemd. I was making the sysvinit comparison here for simplicity's sake.

>Anyone who erroneously thinks that van Smoorenburg rc is bug free hasn't spent time fixing the whole host of faulty, incomplete, and rickety van Smoorenburg rc scripts that exist.

I never said it was bug-free, I said that the problems with the rc scripts aren't inherent to the sysvinit model.

At the same time, the list of bug reports that the init scripts used with sysvinit had (because they all had to replicate the same code, in different ways, patched together from some stackoverflow post) is uncountable.

That's not an inherent problem: bsd's rc.subrs and similar systems exist, which fix this issue in a sysv/bsd style init system. They don't even technically require patching init itself.

Systemd's problems are deeper in. One major one is most of its design, and its entire conception.

I wonder what security problems Linux kernel had in that time?

Other init systems (probably) had no exploits because dull rock can be exploited only so much.

IMO having a security bug in systemd is not acceptable. Commits should be carefully reviewed. That other projects (even if these include very important ones) have way more is "meh".

From what I understood from the systemd code is that it's written pretty defensively. I quite like systemd because its useful, thought out, etc. But then I want all that without any drawbacks (because why not!). Probably unrealistic, but nice to strive for a perfect project.

Well, if dull rock can't be exploited, maybe we should be putting dull rock in PID1?

This exploit isn't in PID 1 and neither are all of the other things people claim are in PID1. PID1 in systemd doesn't contain much more than it needs to, it handles parsing unit files which could arguably be split out but that still leaves something highly privileged to parse them, but just about everything else would be a major pain to separate from PID 1 as most of it is how to walk the dependency graph from where it currently is to the target that it's trying to get to. It also needs to handle supervision and other core parts of init but by and large most of the claims out there that everything and the kitchen sink is being put into PID 1 are completely baseless.

Even so, systemd init tends to (by my understanding) trust other parts of systemd.

In addition, I don't see all that many other daemons running that can be attributed to systemd: where did crond go? What daemon replaced it? Because from out here, it seems that it was sucked into the core, and don't tell me that's an essential.

Finally, even if the core is rock solid, there's no excuse for these kinds of exploits in core software, which systemd seems to want to be, especially not this frequently.