Comment 0 for bug 1718444

systemd-sysctl in Xenial forces itself over procps by shipping a link for procps.service to systemd-sysctl.service. However, it does not obey the order both of the files and also of the sysctls within the files. Instead it uses a simple hashmap. As it turns out that's fixed upstream and systemd master uses an ordered hashmap because of this, which at least preserves order within single files. Traditionally files in sysctl.d have been prefixed with numbers to ensure an order and that's now completely non-deterministic on Xenial.

Relevant upstream commit: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/886cf982d3018f7451f0548dadbc05bd2d583bb6

Note that conf_files_list_nulstr in master sorts the configuration files using strcmp, so even order of configuration files should be obeyed.