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Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

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Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#211

Post by pawadu »

sevensor wrote: post #208
pawadu wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think systemd would benefit from a slower adaptation. The network and boot issues that practically everyone have encountered are mostly due to incorrect default configurations. This shows that the maintainers are not ready to use systemd as they don't yet fully understand it.

Like PulseAudio in its early years, systemd bothers a lot of people because it was pushed out before it was quite ready, and therefore breaks things that used to work. But also like PulseAudio, it solves a whole lot of problems for which the solutions were becoming increasingly hacky and unstable. I don't believe a slower roll-out would have helped in either case, because many of the issues were undetectable without…

From a users point of view there is little difference between software that crashes because its garbage and software that crashes because it is in early stage of development but otherwise a good solution.

Lennart should write more robust software and maintainers should do more QA when doing this type of system-wide changes.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#212

Post by amyjess »

sebcat wrote: post #106

> The justification for storing logs in a binary format was speed and performance, they are more easily indexed and faster to search. Are there any benchmarks for this? I don't know why, and I may be doing things wrong, but journalctl -lu --since yesterday in our prod env takes a couple of seconds before I see any output, while a (z)grep on a date rotated, potentially compressed log file on a non-journald system is g…

Using systemd to manage docker images, I've found journalctl --unit foo to be massively useful when debugging "why did this docker image crash?".

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#213

Post by regularfry »

ajross wrote: post #87
rsync wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep forgetting why I hate systemd (and as a FreeBSD user for all things, I have never used it) and then an article like this reminds me ... binary logs. Seriously - just reading it is painful. binary logs That's a lot of things, but it ain't unix.

Meh. You get used to journalctl awfully quickly. For someone who never uses it, it's going to have some friction. You need to remember the command and how to spell it, which I'll admit isn't trivial compared to "just dig around in /var/log" style we're all used to. But you get over that hump in an hour. For the straightforward "?!$! something happened just grep for it in the log file" it's no harder or slower. And yo…

> And you start noticing things like -f and --since that have no good analogs in the text log world, and it seems like it has value.

-f is `less +F`, no?

--since is neat. You could hack it up with a sort and an awk, but it's nice having it built in.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#214

Post by teddyh »

digi_owl wrote: post #95

More and more systemd is becoming symptomatic of deeper divide within the Linux "community". The split being between those that embraced Linux for being a free, in both senses, _nix unburdened by AT&T and running on commodity hardware, and those that got to know it after the dot-com crash as the L in LAMP. The former cares for Linux as a _nix, the latter could not care less about _nix and may see it as a vestigial ap…

Let me just say that I disagree: I am squarely in the former camp – I started with SunOS 4 in 1992, learned to use the Internet before the WWW, and am a long-time GNU advocate, and I am also a professional system administrator. I like systemd just fine. In fact, I started using it at home and at work just as soon as the package became available in Debian 7 (wheezy).

I think, however, that you have a point in that some people ascribe some mystical properties to the design of _nix and _nix-like systems. I have never done this, perhaps because I remember the early days of OS/platform wars (Amiga or Atari? PC or console? Unix or VMS?), first on BBSes, then on Usenet. I also, early on, read the Unix-Haters Handbook, and I found it enlightening, even though it is not always spot-on.

I leave all die-hard advocates with this quote:

“All Software Sucks, All Hardware Sucks”

(http://www.absurdnotions.org/an20010622.gif)

(Source: (http://www.absurdnotions.org/page75.html). Start of storyline: (http://www.absurdnotions.org/page74.html))

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#215

Post by traviscj »

rkrzr wrote: post #200
digi_owl wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of the "separate" components share core code at compile time. If they were truly separate they could be downloaded piecemeal and compiled independently.

This is indeed an issue in practice: I recently wanted to use the "systemd-journal-gatewayd" component in Ubuntu 16.04, which ships with systemd v229. Yet, the feature I needed was only available in v231. Although I'm only interested in a newer version of "systemd-journal-gatewayd" there is no way to upgrade just this one component, it seems.

I don't get this. How do you know that the v231 for that component will work with older versions of everything else? If you do, why not just compile it yourself? If you don't like that, why not upgrade everything to v231?

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#216

Post by Shorel »

aaronky wrote: post #48
xenadu02 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said the unit philosophy was the be-all, end-all? Unix doesn't even believe it's own philosophy because it's too damn painful. Why does ls do sorting? Why does grep do -R recursive searching? How is that "Do one thing and do it well"? Unix is just a collection of random decisions made by various people over the years. The Unix philosophy is really more like "I've always done it that way so don't you dare change i…

"Who said the Unix philosophy was the be-all, end-all?" I didn't and I don't know anyone that has. I was comparing systemd and SysV. "Unix is just a collection of random decisions made by various people over the years." "Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run." - Theo de Raadt "The layout of /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/loca…

> NFS is horrible. Unix/Linux is a multi-user operating system why would you not want to have groups?

Now that's backwards. He obviously mean a better permission system. Do you seriously think groups is the best way?

Access Control Lists are a better way.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#217

Post by amyjess »

flukus wrote: post #19
jcrites wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think systemd needs to do most of the things it does. Russ Allbery's analysis of systemd [1], written as part of Debian's evaluation of whether to switch to systemd, explains the benefits. Journal integration is something that Russ was also skeptical about, until he realized its value: * Integrated daemon status. This one caught me by surprise, since the systemd journal was functionality that I expected to dislike.…

I thought that was the part of systemd that was universally liked? The best arguments against systemd seem to be that everything becomes implemented in or tightly bound to it.

This is also the rationale behind uselessd, which keeps the service management part and cuts out everything else.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#218

Post by nailer »

nailer wrote: post #137

Does systemd have a network protocol like syslog, i.e. is there a native way to send logs for a particular unit/service to a remote machine? Everything I find just says to install syslog, which surprises me.

Actually found what I was looking for (via http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23082512/coreos-systemd-j...): https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-jou...

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#219

Post by nailer »

JdeBP wrote: post #196
nailer wrote: post #137

Does systemd have a network protocol like syslog, i.e. is there a native way to send logs for a particular unit/service to a remote machine? Everything I find just says to install syslog, which surprises me.

Would native actually be your preference, though? Or would you really prefer tools that spoke existing protocols like RELP?

native would be my preference as I'd rather avoid installing any software at all. Protocol will be HTTPS, format will be https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/json/

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#220

Post by microtonal »

pawadu wrote: post #211
sevensor wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like PulseAudio in its early years, systemd bothers a lot of people because it was pushed out before it was quite ready, and therefore breaks things that used to work. But also like PulseAudio, it solves a whole lot of problems for which the solutions were becoming increasingly hacky and unstable. I don't believe a slower roll-out would have helped in either case, because many of the issues were undetectable without…

From a users point of view there is little difference between software that crashes because its garbage and software that crashes because it is in early stage of development but otherwise a good solution. Lennart should write more robust software and maintainers should do more QA when doing this type of system-wide changes.

I agree very much with the points that you are making.

It would also help if small parts of a system would be replaced at a time. Replacing daemon/process supervision, login handling, logging, network configuration, etc. all at the same time in distributions that are used by millions of users is quite risky.

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