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Linux distros without systemd

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#431

Post by pard68 »

asteven wrote: post #310
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…

My experience is like 100% different from yours. I have the feeling systemd is meant exactly for what you call hobby or novice users. I actually enjoy some of it on my laptop to be honest ;-) But in the datacenter it has caused me hours and hours of 'fixing problems that did not exist before systemd came along'. Most of it's 'improvements' target the desktop user. Many of it's 'improvements' actually get in the way i…

Boot time is a big deal for us. Not sure if it matters, but I don't get paid enough to decide what matters. All I know is we paid extra for some Dell software that lets you fine tune the BIOS and we streamline for boot speed. We're currently in the process of moving anything that can be run on a VM to a VM so this will be even less of a concern in the future and pid 1 will be more of a bottle neck. That said, except for the db servers, we don't run mem checks on boot so our servers are very fast to boot (I believe Dell cites that each Gb of RAM is equal to 1 sec. of boot time when you are running with the mem checker on).

The only time I ever do a "deep dive" and manual setup a server is when I have to provision a server for a new department/service. Generally speaking ansible does the work for me and I just hit go on my console and then go get a coffee. So I don't see much of a headache in server provisioning. I also am on the automation side of Ops so I do a lot more work with a already setup server, and in that case, like you said, systemd API is a godsend.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#432

Post by pard68 »

peterwwillis wrote: post #278
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…

Ops person here. When you set up a node, you set up all its networking, its services, its packages, its configuration, etc. It doesn't matter what your technology is - you set it up to do whatever it needs, and then hopefully you never have to re-do that again. Systemd's hydra of services affected a lot of that, so we had to learn all the weird gotchas to get newer distros to work properly. And it's not just a little…

Our bottle neck is often pid 1 for boot time. We don't do mem check on boot so that saves us 1 second * Gb_of_RAM in boot, which is why most BIOS take forever on a server. We also don't run anything in PCI slots so we have the PCI checker disabled too (all our servers are Dells they have some software you can license to config the BIOS).

I'm new to the game, I only vaguely remember a time when Ubuntu wasn't on systemd. I don't have 30 years of experience with any init system, but I do have 10+ years with systemd. I didn't use another init until I got this job and had to learn sysv. So I'm coming from the exact opposite, it sounds like, place of you. To me, everything you said is 100% true, but about sysv and its line.

I also don't provision too many servers these days because with the exception of a few things that were deemed "to important" all our servers have automated build scripts to go from 0 to prod.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#433

Post by pard68 »

silversconfused wrote: post #218
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.

If you are referring to my comment regarding Linux not being for desktops...

I use Linux on my desktop. The only non-Linux machines in my house are my work Windows machine and my sister in law's Windows machine. All my personal machines, my wife's laptop, and my kids' desktop are all Linux flavors. Linux is a great desktop imho. That said, Linux is not primarily a desktop machine. It gets some pro-Desktop patches but at the end of the day, Linux is designed for servers and paid for by people interested in its usage as a server.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#434

Post by fgonzag »

tracker1 wrote: post #214
pmezard wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't execute low level code in terms of hardware. It's a init system, all it (should do) is create a dependency graph and initialize the services in the correct order.

Many init systems have been created in bash, and I'd hardly call that a low level language.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#435

Post by asveikau »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #330
asveikau wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Counter-anecdote, I switched to systemd all the way back in 2012 on Arch, even before it was mandatory and way before it was in a state where other distros felt comfortable switching and I remember to this day that after I did the conversion and hit reboot, an absolute panic hit me, I was 110% sure the system won't boot afterward, just because of how drastic the change was to perform on a live system, (because simple…

To be fair to your view, I did observe fewer issues in Arch's systemd packaging vs. say, Debian. Arch I think is pretty good overall.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#436

Post by yellowapple »

Intermernet wrote: post #427
yellowapple wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People do not write million lines of code applications in bash, for a reason And that reason is that one rarely needs to write a million lines of Bash: http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html

If they'd picked Perl, they could have written an init system in one line... (hopefully, obviously /s)

> (hopefully, obviously /s)

You underestimate my masochism and/or overestimate my sense of restraint ;)

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#437

Post by inferiorhuman »

ajross wrote: post #369
viraptor wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the CVEs, it's the comments like this: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/5998#issuecomment-30... (Just in case, this is an security issue because it enables constant dosing, as well as clears the resolver cache making spoofing easier)

I think that's valid enough. Not sure it rises to the level of "OMG they ignore bugs" implied by the original comment though. I mean... they took the patch and fixed the bug, right? Poettering was just being a jerk about whether it deserved a CVE. (Also... gotta be honest that's sort of a vanity CVE. Note the complete lack of details in the report itself, it never saw an eyeball after it was filed. It's valid enough,…

I think that's valid enough. Not sure it rises to the level of "OMG they ignore bugs" implied by the original comment though. I mean... they took the patch and fixed the bug, right? Poettering was just being a jerk about whether it deserved a CVE.

Poettering is dismissive of nearly every bug. Remember when systemd would default to starting units as root when it couldn't parse the username? We're not talking about some minor piece of software like a sound multiplexing daemon, we're talking about the core userland piece of every Linux install. Bug reports on something that central should be taken seriously and with a minimum of snark.

I'm with Poettering on the specifics here: if we filed a CVE for every theoretically-exploitable-but-unexploited-until-fix-released crash bug the system would be beyond useless.

All the more reason to reduce the attack vectors and ensure that your code is well thought out, and coded defensively. That you have too many security issues to generate CVEs for each and every one is a problem in and of itself. Ten years ago how many people thought that all of these speculative execution side channel attacks were possible or practical?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#438

Post by michaelmrose »

rendaw wrote: post #411
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?

I've used it just a bit. AFAICT Shepherd is a fairly minimal dependency graph. It's not comprehensive - in Guix there are services that exist above and below Shepherd and you can't define ordering dependencies between these (ex: a shepherd service can't depend on a mount (above shepherd), or an inetd service (below shepherd) on a database). I'm not sure that's a huge problem in practice. Shepherd process stdout/stder…

The last complaint seems feasible to address have you thought of adding an issue?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#439

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

haolez wrote: post #102
brobdingnagians wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the problem I have it is with the imperialistic culture that came with it and with the serious security bugs that they keep sweeping under the rug. It is easier to configure and is convenient to have one holistic system in a lot of ways, but... They pushed for Gnome to have a hard dependency on it so that everyone would be _forced_ to use it instead of just letting it be accepted by merits. They have a track…

But I think that the author of systemd himself wrote a patch for Gnome to keep it working without systemd. Am I correct?

My understanding is that it the patching of Gnome to work without systemd was done by others (Guix, Void developers), not Poettering: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/66ass2/update_void_l...

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#440

Post by ernst_klim »

m4rtink wrote: post #359
szemet wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ocaml parallelism/concurrency story was not that good - but Haskell has just got its fancy new epoll based I/O manager (100000+ lightweight threads) around that time, with the 7.0.1 release (16 November 2010) They could have even take inspiration, imagine: typed, functional, monadic init files - "systemd: avoid success at all costs" :)

That's nice in theory, but where are all the people who know Ocaml to write it and contribute to it ? I might be clueless but I can't really name any significant projects written in it, which might imply something about the number of people using it and being able to work on and contribute to something as large and important as systemd.

>I might be clueless but I can't really name any significant projects written in it

From system programming solely: libguestfs, Xen API, liquidsoap, Unison, MirageOS, google drive on fuse, 0install.

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