Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

techrepublic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 191 posts

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#51

Post by nickik »

einpoklum wrote: post #33
nickserv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're separate binaries, and can be easily unbundled. That they're part of the same project is actually a win for me, it helps to make the various components work well together. Also there is a common thread or philosophy in how things are built, making learning easier. In fact "the system is a single project" approach reminds me of the BSDs, which is arguably better than Linux as far as usability and security is c…

> They're separate binaries, and can be easily unbundled. No, they can't. The fact that they're compiled into separate binaries doesn't mean they're independent - they're completely dependent.

That is in fact simply wrong.

First of all, most of these systems are totally voluntary. You can simply not use them. And if you use them, you can replace them with other components that speak the same API if you want.

The binaries talk to each other with a message passing API and that is actually the proper way to make a replaceable component. This has been done quite a few times before for many different reasons.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#52

Post by tiew9Vii »

znpy wrote: post #3

I see a lot of hate about systems and I used to loathe it too. Then I took a course on systemd specifically and it opened my eyes, and now I'm quite fond about it. Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space. It has quirks and bugs like all software, but I think it works very well, all things considered. To those who say that it's…

I'm an end user.

As an end user I don't mind SystemD for writing / managing service unit files. I often find the restart policies and one time only jobs useful especially in cloud with automated deployments. My feelings on SystemD as end user are neutral, it does have some useful things but I understand some of peoples grievances with it.

On the other side I have some OpenBSD systems and the simplicity of OpenBSD service management just being plain bash files is really pleasing to use if anything because of the simplicity and power/functionality it provides without actually doing much itself.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#53

Post by nickik »

Xylakant wrote: post #18
rwmj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd is a perfectly fine init system. The problem is that it comes bundled with a whole bunch of other tools for handling networks, cron, ntp, etc which really ought to be separate projects. By bundling them with the successful init system they're not exposed to the usual Darwinian selection processes that shake out the best free software.

Honestly, I much prefer systemd timers over cron. They work just like systemd units and shed all the odd special cases that cron accumulated over the years. They’re pretty well defined in how they behave in face of systems being down while a job was supposed to run (more a desktop thing, but relevant for some server cases as well). It makes sense to use the same config mechanism. Still, systemd timers are exposed to…

Anybody that has used time units will never use cron again.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#54

Post by AsyncAwait »

pdkl95 wrote: post #17
znpy wrote: post #3

I see a lot of hate about systems and I used to loathe it too. Then I took a course on systemd specifically and it opened my eyes, and now I'm quite fond about it. Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space. It has quirks and bugs like all software, but I think it works very well, all things considered. To those who say that it's…

> does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system "managing the system" is not "ONE [problem]". A big part of the problem with systemd is this presupposition that management of something as large and complex as a modern OS is a single monolithic[1] problem. > it's complex because it does a complex work. See, you agree that it's a complex problem! It's so complex with so many different use cases it isn't even p…

You still have s6, openRC etc. as choices, but it's funny that nobody of the anti-systemd folk was willing to pick up the work needed to maintain consolekit, yet when logind came around, had lots of strong things to say.

How about picking up the work as well?

And none of the alternatives seem to really get away from the bash script paradigm & more towards the declarative side of things, which doesn't feel like much beyond keeping all that was terrible about sysvinit around in thin wrappers.

Maybe GuixSD is the one exception to this.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#55

Post by mikekchar »

nickik wrote: post #47
hyperman1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the point: Something like systemd has a good reason to exist. But the devil is in the creating team. We've seen pulseaudio, a good system in theory, but an untrustworthy unstable system in practice. And if it wont work, it is so complicated and non-transparent that you need a specialist. Taking a step backward from Alsa is hard, and they managed to do it. Now that same team is messing with sys…

The amount of features and stuff they add to systemd is seriously impressive. They have bugs sometimes, but I have been running it in production for years and years and never had a real issue. Its an incredibly stable system. Sometimes a new version has a bug because systemd has to work in so many context, those get fixed very quickly generally. I would challange anybody, to introduce a totally new system layer on li…

I think Poettering deserved his fair share of the blame for the problems in Pulse Audio. However, a guy writes an over ambitious project, has a lot of problems, has problems with interfacing with users, etc, etc, etc. This is the internet! Pick a random project an Github and you'll probably find similar issues. The real problem here was Red Hat -- and it was literally the same problem with systemd. They tied it so closely with the rest Gnome that you couldn't reasonably use Gnome without it. And since all of the distros were essentially riding on Red Hat's tail, everybody got strong armed into using this stuff before it was ready (to be fair, it was years and years and years before Pulse was stable at all).

I am not a fan of Poettering's code or his attitude, but people have treated him exceptionally badly. He's just doing his job. If these projects were allowed to compete for mind share fairly there would be no problem. If Red Hat had made sure that Gnome could work with alternatives then there would be no problem. Pulse audio would have died a rightful death. Systemd? I suspect that it would still have succeeded.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#56

Post by igetspam »

nickik wrote: post #47
hyperman1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the point: Something like systemd has a good reason to exist. But the devil is in the creating team. We've seen pulseaudio, a good system in theory, but an untrustworthy unstable system in practice. And if it wont work, it is so complicated and non-transparent that you need a specialist. Taking a step backward from Alsa is hard, and they managed to do it. Now that same team is messing with sys…

The amount of features and stuff they add to systemd is seriously impressive. They have bugs sometimes, but I have been running it in production for years and years and never had a real issue. Its an incredibly stable system. Sometimes a new version has a bug because systemd has to work in so many context, those get fixed very quickly generally. I would challange anybody, to introduce a totally new system layer on li…

Finally moving to an OS with systemd as the init system cost my team two months of platform stability. Every time we thought we had fiund the magic order or operations incantation and fire things up, we'd find a new poorly documented config item that had to be mucked with. Nothing so fundamental as starting a set of services should be that hard. SystemD has a few nice features but none of them are worth the headache. I applaud Knoppix for this move. I'm personally headed back to slackware, now that everything I work on is containerized anyway. SytemD won the war by persistence alone, not quality of work.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#57

Post by tannhaeuser »

brianpgordon wrote: post #25
goatinaboat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemd is Red Hat’s version of the old “embrace, extend, extinguish” playbook.

Even if you grant some sinister motive on the part of Red Hat (which I do not), the analogy doesn't work. EEE requires some existing technology to embrace. Lennart Poettering built systemd from the ground up. And everything is open-source and done with the collaboration of the community anyway.

What's being embraced here is Linux and its standing as a preferred OS for running F/OSS itself, by wrapping everything into Windows-y abstractions (and .INI files even).

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#58

Post by ddalex »

jrugk wrote: post #45
tannhaeuser wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's complex because it does a complex work Hence it's pointless because it doesn't make things any simpler. All it does is making things monolithic and wrapping concepts that are perfectly fine by themselves, forcing third-party software to write to systemd's APIs. > Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. "Managing systems" is not what is meant by "doing one thing, and doing it we…

>The trend to get rid of systemd and its metastasis into most of Linux is excellent news. I don't know where you're seeing this trend, really. For all major distros, it's been the opposite thus far.

However it's slowing changing. Knoppix has always been seen as a trend setter, and it still has a large influence where it matters - open source maintainers that are not corporate-driven (i.e. Debian).

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#59

Post by geofft »

nickik wrote: post #48
goatinaboat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemd is Red Hat’s version of the old “embrace, extend, extinguish” playbook.

Nonsense conspiracy crap. Red Hat didn't even want systemd initially. The developers wanted it and basically just did it without cooperate actually backing the idea for a while. But keep your lame conspiracy theory, it will surly get you much open-source street cred.

Yup. Reminder that RHEL 6 uses upstart. If this were a Red Hat conspiracy, why would they have switched from sysvinit to an incompatible competitor to systemd?

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#60

Post by makomk »

brianpgordon wrote: post #25
goatinaboat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemd is Red Hat’s version of the old “embrace, extend, extinguish” playbook.

Even if you grant some sinister motive on the part of Red Hat (which I do not), the analogy doesn't work. EEE requires some existing technology to embrace. Lennart Poettering built systemd from the ground up. And everything is open-source and done with the collaboration of the community anyway.

One existing technology Red Hat leveraged to achieve this was Gnome. A few years ago, the Gnome developers (many of whom were employed by Red Hat) decided to create a hard dependency on logind which was part of systemd. Other distros were mollified by being told that logind didn't really depend on systemd and they could just take it out and use it. Then, once that was safely ensconsed, Poettering declared that actually using logind without systemd wasn't supported, they shouldn't have done it, and he was going to completely break it. All the desktop distros were forced to abandon their own init systems and switch to systemd, with all the headaches and bugs that entailed.

Another technology they're using is to some extent the Linux kernel itself. The API used to create device nodes when drivers are loaded is undocumented and the only supported way to use it is udev; anyone else can expect to have their code broken by new kernel releases. That, in turn, is now part of systemd and using it outside of systemd is no longer supported. In effect, the only supported way of using the Linux kernel is with systemd and anyone else is on their own dealing with undocumented, backwards-incompatible changes that the developers have no interest in helping them with.

Post reply on HN