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Linux distros without systemd

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#211

Post by pas »

siffland wrote: post #199

One of my biggest concerns about systemd is the ownership. Sure it is open sourced, however RedHat has a lot of pull on its maintainers (Soon to be IBM). What is to stop them from dual licensing it or close sourcing it. They have lots of products like that (jboss/wildfly...spacewalk/satellite). After everything runs on systemd the ball in in their court. Sure people can say they are going to fork it, but in reality h…

The moment it stops being free Debian drops/forks it.

Furthermore, if Red Hat can monetize a system manager daemon, well ... I mean, good for them.

Oracle tried with the JVM (they had some commercial features).

Furthermore, if systemd provides a lot of basic facilities (global/user services, device management, login sessions, cron, ntp, DNS resolving) someone ought to maintain and support it, and if a for-profit company does it, I don't mind if they try to cover those expenses. (As long as it's also GPL2.)

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#212

Post by nonsense1234 »

lmm wrote: post #15
Whatitat90 wrote: post #4

SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo). I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.

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.

> We still see a pretty high rate of security vulnerabilities in it.

Prove it. As someone else pointed out, there were 5 CVEs for systemd in 2017 and 7 so far this year most of which are low severity. If you think the mess of shell scripts and programs that systemd replaces had less than that you're simply delusional.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#213

Post by jolmg »

nnq wrote: post #123

What's the recommended way for someone to learn systemd properly? Is there a readable manual somewhere that documents everything? That's the only thing I find scary about such big systems, the lack of comprehensive docs and a "starting point for learning them" from 0 to hero. Like, with Git there's tons of nice tutorials like "learn kit bottom up by reinventing it in way X" etc. plus a good "default book". What's the…

The Archlinux Wiki is my go-to for that kind of thing:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd

Also, check the related articles on the right sidebar on the top of the article.

It doesn't document everything, but it quickly gets you to learning the overview, the basics, and what's most important for general usage of systemd.

If you really want absolutely everything the references are the man-pages. Excluding those that document C functions, there seems to be 256 systemd man-pages in total. 36 are regular commands (section 1; like systemctl), 64 are file formats (section 5; like systemd.service), 139 are system administration commands (section 8; like daemons like systemd-networkd), and 17 are miscellaneous topics (section 7; like bootup).

I would consider the manpages of section 1 and 5 to be the important ones, and just section 1 is enough if you never intend to read or write a service or other unit file yourself.

Here's an online index of the manpages:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/index.html

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#214

Post by tracker1 »

pmezard wrote: post #205
grumdan wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have a track record of labeling serious bugs as non-issues, ignoring them, or just not filing them as CVEs. Serious issues keep coming up. Additionally, this is not likely to stop, since they took an init system that was (mostly) written in a memory-safe language (bash) and rewrote it in a memory-unsafe language (C++), thus enabling a whole class of systemic security issues that will keep popping up in the fut…

Memory safety is not the alpha and omega of programming languages. People do not write million lines of code applications in bash, for a reason, trade-offs are to be made. That said I agree they should have picked Go instead /s.

Rust would have been more appropriate. Something like SystemD at such a low level in terms of hardware and service management should not be done in a language with a garbage collector imho.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#215

Post by silversconfused »

eropple wrote: post #151
chapium wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You either fall into a group that hates systemd or one that could care less about the problem systemd is solving.

...and when you care quite deeply about the problems being solved, think they're being solved in a pretty good way, and are unsettled by the anti-systemd frothers literally sending Lennart death threats? (Like...this is bad , yo. There are arguments--bad ones, IMO, but arguments--against systemd. But the people who like systemd aren't sending death threats to Devuan people or whatever.) What group is that?

To be fair, the ones sending death threats are contributing negatively, while the fork effort is a positive contribution to the situation. We'd appreciate not being lumped in with the worst offenders, if you'd be so kind.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#216

Post by asveikau »

chapium wrote: post #111
beaconfield wrote: post #39

It's comical how people get so "jazzed" about something like not liking systemd and make a whole movement about it (with their t-shirts and everything). I get people may not love everything about systemd (or maybe they hate it), but I'm not convinced it's so bad. I've been using it since RHEL 7 and I've really gotten used to all of the benefits of systemd. It also doesn't hurt that I went to the session on pid 1 by L…

You either fall into a group that hates systemd or one that could care less about the problem systemd is solving.

I didn't care much about the problem systemd was solving, I was content to let the init process go through without touching it.

Then one day several years ago I did an apt-get dist-upgrade and my system didn't boot after that. I have personally hit way more issues with unbootable systems or having to drop into single user mode to fix some BS with systemd. That was enough to make me dislike it, or convert into a hater, and switch most of my personal usage away from Linux.

I think it's gotten better since then. I still dread updating Linux boxes, because I know that some percentage of those updates will have a systemd bug introduced resulting in a non-bootable system or one where I have to manually fix it up.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#217

Post by syn0byte »

pard68 wrote: post #196

This anti-systemd meme is getting tiring. I generally find it is perpetuated by people who use Linux at a hobby level. Rarely do I speak with guys in Ops who dislike systemd. I am not trying to discredit people here, there are hobby users who are more knowledgeable about Linux related systems than many guys who are professionals. My point is that Linux and systemd are both meant for use on servers, in production, whe…

Hi, ops guy; Fuck systemd.

Boot time: A possible 5-10 extra seconds from sysvinit is the problem here not the 5 minutes of BIOS/EFI POST time for those server boxen?

Logs: Where's the storage of the log data in journalctl and what tools can I use to read that data in a small PXE rescue environment? But hot damn I didn't have to ls /var/log so that's nice.

Sarcasm aside how does it make your life any easier? I got a stack of FIXMEs to work on to get our infrastructure working, lot alone stable, on systemd.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#218

Post by silversconfused »

pard68 wrote: post #196

This anti-systemd meme is getting tiring. I generally find it is perpetuated by people who use Linux at a hobby level. Rarely do I speak with guys in Ops who dislike systemd. I am not trying to discredit people here, there are hobby users who are more knowledgeable about Linux related systems than many guys who are professionals. My point is that Linux and systemd are both meant for use on servers, in production, whe…

Being dismissed as a meme is tiring as well. I like hacking on my system at boot time, and dismissing my use case because of your own is kinda hostile.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#219

Post by silversconfused »

eropple wrote: post #172
yarrel wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I remove this buggy attack surface from that workflow and why should I have to?

"How do I remove" - I dunno, because I don't care to remove it. Somebody's probably done it. Search on Google? It's open source, so look at the code, submit a patch, fork if you gotta? "Buggy attack surface" - I am unaware of attacks that target journald; can you point me to a practicable PoC attack? "Why should I have to" - because other people are building your distros, expending their effort on open source project…

Then you are commenting on the wrong post. This post is about the systems that do not use systemd. Justifying your own use by demanding examples of failure is... odd here.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#220

Post by tracker1 »

ajross wrote: post #179
fabiomaia wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So what use cases is Docker good for? Why is it so popular if systemd suffices?

Docker is about deployment. The isolation model is built on the same tooling that systemd uses, but the usage model is all about how to come up with an easily isolated runtime environment that can be published and extended in a big development community. Basically systemd has nothing like a dockerfile, that's not what it's for. I think there's a good argument though that Docker should be retargetting its encapsulatio…

See podman[1]

[1] https://podman.io/

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