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Linux distros without systemd

ungleich.ch

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#181

Post by blibble »

acdha wrote: post #168
blibble wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes it's still that bad, my previously reliable systems are now non-deterministic and break randomly every few days I discover some new bit of non-determinism: - systems getting stuck for long periods at startup or reboot with with some useless text like "Waiting for user session to shutdown" - reboots never completing at all (getting completely wedged shutting down) - jobs starting in weird orders, like crond starti…

All of those issues happened with SysV init, as well — there are literally decades of history of people working around things like unmounting failed filesystems, watchdogs to kill -9 hung daemons, etc. For example, you mentioned crond startup before the network but that's hardly new with systemd — checking the oldest system I have access to shows that it's configured with two dependencies: “# Required-Start: $local_f…

it's the non-determinism that's the problem

as I said, I can fix the issues one by one as I notice them, but if they only occur 1 boot in 10, or maybe 1 in 100 it's miserable and a much less reliable system than before

but hey, the systems now boot 2 seconds faster (if they boot at all...)

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#182

Post by clarry »

tombert wrote: post #40

I do find it funny that people crap all over systemd, but don't seem to have a huge problem with launchd, despite the fact that systemd was almost a direct port of it. Personally, while I do think that systemd's scope might have been a bit too ambitious, I do find it easier than something like Upstart

> I do find it funny that people crap all over systemd, but don't seem to have a huge problem with launchd

Because I've never been forced to use launchd. Well, you could say that I've never been forced to use systemd either but that's kinda how it feels when distros swap it out for you and things start depending on it.

Guess what? I'd be furious if the distros I use forced me onto launchd all of a sudden.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#183

Post by iamvik »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #12

I get that not everybody likes systemd, but a lot of the criticisms seem misguided and looking at sysvinit with role-colored glasses. For example, people are complaining about logind being included, but forget that consolekit was unmaintained before that. Yes, there's parts to systemd that not everyone will use, like container support, but in that case you can pretty safely ignore that use case. For me, systemd has p…

It's a stupid position to take - watch luke smith's video on it for a neutral point of view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ljfOCiP0XM

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#184

Post by JdeBP »

eropple wrote: post #177
JdeBP wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Journald is also not part of systemd core--at least, I think so; this one I've never really looked at myself. You really should. journald is not optional.

Yup, seems you're right - journald appears to be the only mandatory non-PID1 process for systemd. Good to know. It also will forward happily to rsyslogd if that's your bag and then you never have to look at it, so I'm gonna just give a big ol' emoji shrug on this one.

> journald appears to be the only mandatory non-PID1 process for systemd.

You need to read a lot more. The Desktop Bus is mandatory too. Lennart Poettering reminded everyone of this back in 2015.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#185

Post by eropple »

JdeBP wrote: post #184
eropple wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, seems you're right - journald appears to be the only mandatory non-PID1 process for systemd. Good to know. It also will forward happily to rsyslogd if that's your bag and then you never have to look at it, so I'm gonna just give a big ol' emoji shrug on this one.

> journald appears to be the only mandatory non-PID1 process for systemd. You need to read a lot more. The Desktop Bus is mandatory too. Lennart Poettering reminded everyone of this back in 2015.

D-Bus, as discussed elsewhere in this thread (where I learned about this, too), is a specification rather than a concrete implementation. Are you asserting that systemd does not work with alternative D-Bus implmentations? That would be weird, seeing as how they wrote an alternative one...

Also, since I've been "reading more", and I can check after I get back from lunch--at least at some point Debian shipped systemd without D-Bus on minimal installs. Maybe that's no longer the case, but the stuff I'm reading seems to be post-2015.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#186

Post by sprash »

JohnFen wrote: post #160
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier versions of systemd were fairly buggy, but then it was still in its infancy and its in a much better state now. systemd (not SystemD) changes a core part of the OS, we go from a userspace being bootstrapped by a bunch of different shell scripts calling a dozen individual binaries, to an actual system and service manager configured with unit files. It's a large change, although one other operating systems went…

> and some people don't like change. People really need to stop saying this rather than taking the time to actually understand what people are objecting to.

I like change! I switched to runit and are not looking back.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#187

Post by eropple »

vetinari wrote: post #155
eropple wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your logical consistency, but I'm curious: is D-Bus sufficiently specified that one could write an alternative to it? That is, is it a hard dependency or is it itself an interface? I'm not nearly sufficiently experienced with desktop Linux application development to know. ;)

Yes, DBUS is specified [1]. There are multiple implementations shipping (dbus reference implementation and dbus-broker), as well as several different client libraries. As dbus user, or application, you just need some client library. As an operating system, you also need a daemon running, which is routing the messages among all the clients. [1] - https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html

So it is--and, in reading, it looks like systemd actually ships their own sd-bus client. Huh. TIL. Thanks.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#188

Post by siffland »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #19
lmm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The objections to systemd are still as valid as ever. We still see a pretty high rate of security vulnerabilities in it. However, as projects adopt systemd-proprietary APIs, distros are forced to choose between maintaining ongoing forks of those projects, dropping those projects, or adopting systemd. E.g. I suspect Slackware only avoided being forced to adopt it because they'd already decided to not support gnome.

High rate? Compared to the Linux kernel, systemd's CVE rate is very low.

I have to call this out as a very poor comparision. I would love to know the linux kernel commits in 2019 vs CVE's in a percentage, vs systemd commits in 2019 vs CVE's in a percentage (or 2018 or 2017).

Now compare systemd CVE's with OpenRC or runit CVE's or any other init system and then you have an argument. But comparing it to the kernel with hundreds of people commiting changes is weak.

This comment is not defending nor attacking systemd.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#189

Post by firethief »

mar77i wrote: post #150
telmich wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just added as as-good-as-we-could to the website - do you have any experiences in using it?

Guix is a weird little behemoth of a distribution, that allows you to install different versions of different packages at the same time which then builds your effective file system on the fly. That being said, as mad as this sounds, I've heard people are having a lot of fun with it too, so apparently it's also manageable. Guix is for you if you want to run old software on a discontinued software stack simultaneously…

That makes it immune to dependency hell; there are no two packages you can't have at the same time due to dependency version conflicts.

The big wins for me though are: having all my system configuration in a small set of versionable text files (rather than gigabytes of mutable state), and being able to attach dependencies to the scripts that require them rather than to the system they're expected to be run on.

(I use NixOS, but it's the same concept)

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#190

Post by vbezhenar »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #12

I get that not everybody likes systemd, but a lot of the criticisms seem misguided and looking at sysvinit with role-colored glasses. For example, people are complaining about logind being included, but forget that consolekit was unmaintained before that. Yes, there's parts to systemd that not everyone will use, like container support, but in that case you can pretty safely ignore that use case. For me, systemd has p…

sysvinit is easier to understand for me. It's just a bunch of shell scripts after all. So from the point of simplicity sysvinit wins for me and I never had much problems with it (while I had some problems with systemd). On the other hand, I recently had to write unit file for tomcat and it was extremely easy, systemd had all necessary options. Writing shell script was not that hard, of course, but it was some work.
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