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Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

kevinboone.me

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Re: Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

#61

Post by noncoml »

blueflow wrote: post #51
jcalvinowens wrote: post #45

I couldn't disagree more: I've worked with lots of embedded devices running systemd, and it solves many more problems than it introduces. The community is also quite responsive and helpful in my experience. I won't pretend there aren't occasional weird problems... but there's always a solution, here's a recent example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/34683 Memory use is irrelevant to me: every embedded Linu…

That "occasional weird problem" is because systemd is not designed to be used with other software. While you technically still have the choice to roll your own non-systemd initramfs, it will be an uphill battle.

Not uphill at all; try buildroot

Re: Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

#62

Post by shakna »

viraptor wrote: post #19
fsckboy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't notice anything good systemd does for me, just where it interferes, and that's a constant annoyance, a few days a week.

Can you link some upstream issues you raised about the big annoyances?

The cgroups changes [0] made my life more difficult for a while. "all the low level bits will go away without replacement".

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/555922/

Re: Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

#63

Post by Brian_K_White »

cbmuser wrote: post #39
Brian_K_White wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you imagine this proves or disproves? How many people eat McDonalds? Or buy in to countless other things that can be trivially demonstrated to be against their own interests. I don't know about anyone else but I never heard the critiques of systemd to be based on any doomsday predictions. Everyone knew it would function, and that it even serves one use case better than before. The critique was only ever that…

> How many people eat McDonalds? If you’re already starting like this it’s obvious that the following text will be non-scientific non-sense. As a reminder: There is no such thing as “healthy food” and “unhealthy food”, there is just healthy and unhealthy nutrition. Still baffles me that people think it would actually be legal to sell actual unhealthy food, i.e. poisonous food. Also, “organic food” is just a marketing…

You seem to be a very confused person. I don't even know where to begin with all of this randomness.

Do you actually not understand what is wrong with McDonalds food? Or countless other similar low quality but legal products?

Do you actually not understand that terms like "healthy" and "poison" are not binary but a spectrum? And that every single thing has some aspects of both?

Do you actually not understand how a bag of sugar is not poison and legal to sell, and yet, if you ate one for dinner every night would not be good?

Do you actually not understand the point that popularity does not by itself prove or disprove anything? That great masses of people frequently voluntarily choose the inferior option for all kinds of reasons that aren't even all some form of lack of choice?

Do you actually not understand that that you are attempting to speak for "everyone who ever professionally maintained enterprise servers" TO some of them who quite robustly do not say any such thing?

Re: Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

#64

Post by greatgib »

I'm quite annoyed by the bland statement in the introduction of this article: people make about it don’t stand up to much scrutiny, even the technical ones

Basically the author says that everyone else has stupid rants that doesn't stand but himself has valid claims so that in the end we have a proof that there are a few valid technical rants!

That being said, the main problem with systemd from the beginning is that it is a cancer. It was explicitly designed to prevent as much as possible the modularity and intercompatibility. Kind of opposite to the POSIX way even I think.

Despite what is pretended, doing the things would probably not have impacted features, like boot speed but it was key for them to shove through our throat the usage of systemd in a "all or nothing" way.

And udev or logind are good example of that.

Re: Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

#65

Post by reanimus »

greatgib wrote: post #64

I'm quite annoyed by the bland statement in the introduction of this article: people make about it don’t stand up to much scrutiny, even the technical ones Basically the author says that everyone else has stupid rants that doesn't stand but himself has valid claims so that in the end we have a proof that there are a few valid technical rants! That being said, the main problem with systemd from the beginning is that i…

I think it's fair to say the majority of people don't really care about any of those things as much as having a system that just works -- which was part of their whole argument regarding why package maintainers love it so much and end users really don't tend to care.

Re: Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

#66

Post by AdieuToLogic »

cbmuser wrote: post #39
Brian_K_White wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you imagine this proves or disproves? How many people eat McDonalds? Or buy in to countless other things that can be trivially demonstrated to be against their own interests. I don't know about anyone else but I never heard the critiques of systemd to be based on any doomsday predictions. Everyone knew it would function, and that it even serves one use case better than before. The critique was only ever that…

> How many people eat McDonalds? If you’re already starting like this it’s obvious that the following text will be non-scientific non-sense. As a reminder: There is no such thing as “healthy food” and “unhealthy food”, there is just healthy and unhealthy nutrition. Still baffles me that people think it would actually be legal to sell actual unhealthy food, i.e. poisonous food. Also, “organic food” is just a marketing…

Ignoring the food portion of the above:

> systemd runs on billions of systems worldwide and everyone who ever professionally maintained enterprise servers understand what a bad approach the crude hack that SysVInit with its collection of shell scripts was.

This is your opinion and not one held by all. It also ignores the various BSD system initialization scripts, which are explicitly not "SysVInit" related, and have been in use for decades.

Re: Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

#67

Post by jcalvinowens »

blueflow wrote: post #51
jcalvinowens wrote: post #45

I couldn't disagree more: I've worked with lots of embedded devices running systemd, and it solves many more problems than it introduces. The community is also quite responsive and helpful in my experience. I won't pretend there aren't occasional weird problems... but there's always a solution, here's a recent example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/34683 Memory use is irrelevant to me: every embedded Linu…

That "occasional weird problem" is because systemd is not designed to be used with other software. While you technically still have the choice to roll your own non-systemd initramfs, it will be an uphill battle.

> That "occasional weird problem" is because systemd is not designed to be used with other software.

That's not true, systemd has an explicitly documented and supported initrd interface: https://systemd.io/INITRD_INTERFACE/

It's actually really easy, there's rarely a reason for the initrd to be more complex than a single 50-line busybox script on an embedded device with built-in drivers.

Re: Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

#68

Post by wongogue »

strken wrote: post #57
rjzzleep wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random example. They randomly broke suspect-then-hibernate then the community manager gaslit people into trying to make them believe they don’t actually need the feature in the way it’s used and then silently acknowledged that their fix is broken after all. This is a common pattern by the way. But easily the most irritating thing for me is the simple issue that you used to be able to just go to /var/log/lastlog to se…

The linked GitHub issue is one of the most aggravating exchanges I've ever read: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269 . I don't understand how you can read someone telling you that they want to suspend and then hibernate after a set duration, but A) not understand why this would be desirable, B) not understand that this is compatible with also hibernating at low battery, and C) not understand your own lack…

What the issue author is asking for is also the default behavior of Windows (which is developed by his employer) on laptops.

Re: Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

#69

Post by msarnoff »

I’ve never used it as an init replacement, but runit (https://smarden.org/runit/runit.8) is great for supervising applications and services.

- It’s built into BusyBox and is very lightweight - Configuration is dead simple (everything is basically shell scripts in the filesystem; no special config language) - Includes logging functionality with rotation - Easily controllable from other applications using named pipes - It’s an almost perfect embodiment of the Unix philosophy: a series of small, single-purpose executables (svlogd, runsv, runsvdir, etc), with no strange config file formats or protocols.

Regarding udev, it’s entirely possible to run an embedded system without it if your device has a fixed set of peripherals, doesn’t need to handle hotplugged hardware, and uses a fixed set of kernel modules. In Yocto, you can define a dummy device manager recipe and boom, no udev. As a bonus, removing udev can shave several seconds off your boot time.

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