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How to Crash Systemd in One Command

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Re: How to Crash Systemd in One Command

#71

Post by fapjacks »

georgyo wrote: post #58
fapjacks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that is painfully obvious about the situation with init systems is that people have strong opinions about their preferences. And that makes the systemd situation even more terrible, since it's a choice unwillingly foisted upon a huge number of people. This situation really deserves some choices. For me, that is the number one reason I do not like systemd, even if it's solved some problems.

I agree with your reason, however for me they get outweighed by other factors. If I am a maintainer of a popular distribution, I want my distro to have the best init system, and I want that init system to have the largest user base. EL6 and its derivatives was upstart, debian and its derivatives was upstart. The vast majority of linux systems were upstart for a long period of time. Other systems did not switch to ups…

The choice that was put before the Debian TC was literally "Should we use systemd instead of sysvinit" and did not consider any of the many other init systems. In fact, a motion was put forward to the Debian TC to consider other init systems, and guess what? Pro-systemd TC members pointed to the original motion ("Should we use systemd instead of sysvinit") as the reason not to consider other init systems. That is pretty much as political as it gets.

Re: How to Crash Systemd in One Command

#72

Post by justin_vanw »

brainspider wrote: post #56
justin_vanw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I basically agree with everything you're saying, I just think if the people who think systemd is misguided spend their time writing blog posts about it, nothing will change and the people actually writing the code will have the final say, right or wrong.

Just to play Devil's advocate here, I wouldn't say that nothing will change. Not everybody can code, and not everybody that can code has time to code for a new project. And that's no guarantee that if someone does submit code that it will be accepted. I get the strong impression that systemd is driven by ego first, and technical innovation second. But writing blogposts and making non-coders aware of some of the frust…

I think it's probably not that valuable to write a blog post. Lets see if the UMASK problem, which is totally legitimate and the blog post makes a great case for fixing, actually gets fixed.

Re: How to Crash Systemd in One Command

#73

Post by georgyo »

mjevans wrote: post #59
fapjacks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that is painfully obvious about the situation with init systems is that people have strong opinions about their preferences. And that makes the systemd situation even more terrible, since it's a choice unwillingly foisted upon a huge number of people. This situation really deserves some choices. For me, that is the number one reason I do not like systemd, even if it's solved some problems.

There are exactly two compelling (for me) arguments against systemd, and one that seems to result from it's current focus: * Binary log files (WHYYYYY; OTOH you could argue that the only proper place to do logging is to a remote database.) * Monolithic nature - everything gets shoved in to the daemon, making it harder and more unusual to do things without it. * Servers - systemd seems to be focused on a desktop lifec…

All of these are false.

It stores everything in binary logs, however your old system didn't store it at all. You had a daemon (syslog, rsyslog, etc) that wrote them as plain text. If you start those daemons, you at exactly the same spot as before. Just with an additional copy in a binary log. Which btw, journalctl can do some magical things, and you should take some time to play with it.

systemd is not monolithic, or at the very least its a distributed monolith. The vast majority of services happen in their own userspace process.

Systemd excels with servers, since it standardizes how their execution gets defined. It takes only an added line to spawn them in their own namespaces, set cgroup restrictions, prevent network access, etc. Before hand, doing these things was very hard, so no one did them.

Re: How to Crash Systemd in One Command

#74

Post by fapjacks »

mjevans wrote: post #59
fapjacks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that is painfully obvious about the situation with init systems is that people have strong opinions about their preferences. And that makes the systemd situation even more terrible, since it's a choice unwillingly foisted upon a huge number of people. This situation really deserves some choices. For me, that is the number one reason I do not like systemd, even if it's solved some problems.

There are exactly two compelling (for me) arguments against systemd, and one that seems to result from it's current focus: * Binary log files (WHYYYYY; OTOH you could argue that the only proper place to do logging is to a remote database.) * Monolithic nature - everything gets shoved in to the daemon, making it harder and more unusual to do things without it. * Servers - systemd seems to be focused on a desktop lifec…

Yes, these are also reasons I dislike systemd. Also, one of the original selling points of systemd was "It will reduce boot times significantly!" ... And then it ends up that systemd is actually slower to boot than any of the other ones out there.

Re: How to Crash Systemd in One Command

#75

Post by loeg »

sp332 wrote: post #60
bjourne wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious what functionality other OSes had that Linux did not before systemd came along. Uniform daemon/service handling. Just look at the scripts in /etc/init.d (or wherever they are located in your particular SysV init setup). It's a total mess. The rest of what systemd offers I can't comment on because I'm not familiar with it. But it is clear to me that systemd's declarative .service files are a billion time…

Didn't upstart and launchd cover this before systemd?

launchd was for OSX.

Re: How to Crash Systemd in One Command

#76

Post by jude- »

georgyo wrote: post #58
fapjacks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that is painfully obvious about the situation with init systems is that people have strong opinions about their preferences. And that makes the systemd situation even more terrible, since it's a choice unwillingly foisted upon a huge number of people. This situation really deserves some choices. For me, that is the number one reason I do not like systemd, even if it's solved some problems.

I agree with your reason, however for me they get outweighed by other factors. If I am a maintainer of a popular distribution, I want my distro to have the best init system, and I want that init system to have the largest user base. EL6 and its derivatives was upstart, debian and its derivatives was upstart. The vast majority of linux systems were upstart for a long period of time. Other systems did not switch to ups…

I don't think the distro maintainers had that much say, since the most popular Linux desktop software began to depend on it. It started with GNOME, and now KDE is on its way. This basically forces their hand--if they want to provide a good out-of-the-box experience, they either have to switch to systemd, or continuously fight upstream's patches.

Re: How to Crash Systemd in One Command

#78

Post by redbeard0x0a »

This article got me wondering if maybe the NSA or similar has somebody on the inside of the systemd project that is helping the project along.

Systemd has replaced a lot of init systems in the linux ecosystem and the general development practices of the project is leaving a huge footprint of code that might be exploited.

If they aren't involved, I'm sure they probably know a few different exploits for the system already.

Re: How to Crash Systemd in One Command

#79

Post by [deleted] »

korethr wrote: post #33
justin_vanw wrote: post #3

It seems like it is quite fashionable to hate on systemd, and it seems like systemd is kindof a piece of crap - in some ways. However, linux is missing basic functionality other os's offer, and systemd is showing up and trying to fill in those blanks. This is open source, if you don't like systemd, if you think it's crap, if you think there are obviously better ways to do it, well, what are you waiting for then? Syst…

> However, linux is missing basic functionality other os's offer, and systemd is showing up and trying to fill in those blanks. I'm curious what functionality other OSes had that Linux did not before systemd came along. It seems to me that it has been subsuming functions of other systems on Linux that were already present, as opposed to offering anything new. Socket activation? inetd/xinetd. Timed start of programs?…

[deleted]

Re: How to Crash Systemd in One Command

#80

Post by dijit »

bjourne wrote: post #52
korethr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, linux is missing basic functionality other os's offer, and systemd is showing up and trying to fill in those blanks. I'm curious what functionality other OSes had that Linux did not before systemd came along. It seems to me that it has been subsuming functions of other systems on Linux that were already present, as opposed to offering anything new. Socket activation? inetd/xinetd. Timed start of programs?…

> I'm curious what functionality other OSes had that Linux did not before systemd came along. Uniform daemon/service handling. Just look at the scripts in /etc/init.d (or wherever they are located in your particular SysV init setup). It's a total mess. The rest of what systemd offers I can't comment on because I'm not familiar with it. But it is clear to me that systemd's declarative .service files are a billion time…

I'm definitely not claiming that openBSD has an awesome init system but _all_ my init files look like this:

   #!/bin/sh
   #
   # $OpenBSD: apmd,v 1.1 2011/07/06 18:55:36 robert Exp $
   
   daemon="/usr/sbin/apmd"
   
   . /etc/rc.d/rc.subr
   
   rc_reload=NO
   
   rc_cmd $1
there's also SMF, or runit, or any of the other dozens of init systems which solved the issue you have with consistency, they also solved other problems like socket activation which people wanted in init for some reason.
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