Don't Use Fedora's Fedup Right Now Due To A Bug With Systemd

While Fedora 21 Beta is coming next week, if you're wanting to upgrade early to the Fedora 21 packages, it's advised right now against using Fedora's upgrade utility (Fedup) unless you want to potentially trash your system.

Fedora 21's systemd has a feature of timing out the system startup if it's not complete after 15 minutes of booting. The goal of this systemd feature is to save the system if something was accidentally triggered in powering it up or other problems encountered in booting the system without it being monitored by the system.

The problem with this systemd boot timeout feature is that it considers Fedora's Fedup "install the updated packages" within this time frame. Thus if upgrading to the latest Fedora 21 packages with Fedup and don't have an incredibly fast system, the 15 minute period will likely lapse and systemd will stop the system in the middle of a package upgrade... Quite likely causing some major issues.

News of this nasty Fedup/systemd bug came just before the weekend but developers hope to have a solution in place by Tuesday's Fedora 21 Beta launch date. More details via Adam Williamson's blog warning against using Fedup for now.