systemd Talks Up Automatic Boot Assessment In Light Of The Crowdstrike-Microsoft Outage

In light of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage/disaster that has been wreaking havoc on corporate Windows systems around the world since Friday, systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering pointed out how such a situation on Linux systems could be averted by leveraging systemd's Automatic Boot Assessment functionality.

System's Automatic Boot Assessment feature can allow for reverting to a previous version of the OS or kernel automatically when a system consistently fails to boot. With the systemd-boot bootloader and related tooling within systemd and leveraging the Boot Loader Specification, systemd Automatic Boot Assessment would make for much easier recovery in case of an incident like what happened with Microsoft Windows systems running CrowdStrike software last week.

The only problem? Major Linux distributions aren't yet onboard with using the Automatic Boot Assessment feature. Lennart Poettering wrote on Mastodon.social over the weekend:

"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.
...
And it's a shame that commercial distros do not hook into that, and the boot stack of them hasn't changed in more than a decade, is laughably bad at security (unsigned initrds, ffs!) and robustness, and the if you have boot assessment enabled at all turn it into a fantastic DoS (by showing you a boot menu instead of reverting to a working boot choice)."

Those wanting to learn more about the Automatic Boot Assessment feature that could help Linux systems avoid a CrowdStrike-Microsoft type outage can learn more on systemd.io.