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.
That would be really good especially for immutable systems
Already exists in SteamOS (which is immutable-ish). Each update is downloaded onto a second inactive partition, and the system switches at boot. If it can’t boot, it switches back to the previous system partition and blacklists that update. It tries again when the next update rolls out.
Users never know the difference and should theoretically always have a bootable system that way.