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Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

lists.debian.org

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Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#81

Post by weland »

mjn wrote: post #40
jtchang wrote: post #17

Can anyone give a quick rundown of the different init systems? For the most part it can get confusing for a non day to day system administrator when I am trying to get a program to "run on boot". Between rc.local, init.d, run levels, etc. sometimes it is just frustrating.

I know less about the new Linux ones, but a brief summary of the two big "traditional" ones: Linux systems traditionally use "SysV Init", the init system from AT&T UNIX System V (1983). It's the one that has: 1) run levels; and 2) a pile of shell scripts in /etc/init.d that run on run-level changes. Run levels probably make most sense if you think of Ye Olde Mainframe booting: first it initializes core services, then…

Whoa! You aren't bashing any of them and the explanation is 100% correct! WHAT HAS THE INTERNETS COME TO?

Congratulations on a very well-written summary!

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#83

Post by ekidd »

tszming wrote: post #71
SEJeff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? CoreOS uses docker + systemd extensively and docker is just a pretty wrapper ontop of lxc. https://coreos.com/docs/launching-containers/launching/getti...

I don't use coreos/systemd but some people run into issues like this: https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/issues/3629

Well, that involves running a weird nested stack: The CoreOS systemd, wrapped around a bunch of docker instances, one of which is trying to run the arch Linux systemd inside the container as well.

For what it's worth, Docker containers are generally not complete running machines with their own init system. Instead, they're typically a single top-level process running in an isolated container. Basically, they work more like a Heroku app than complete EC2 machine image.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#84

Post by jeltz »

mjn wrote: post #40
jtchang wrote: post #17

Can anyone give a quick rundown of the different init systems? For the most part it can get confusing for a non day to day system administrator when I am trying to get a program to "run on boot". Between rc.local, init.d, run levels, etc. sometimes it is just frustrating.

I know less about the new Linux ones, but a brief summary of the two big "traditional" ones: Linux systems traditionally use "SysV Init", the init system from AT&T UNIX System V (1983). It's the one that has: 1) run levels; and 2) a pile of shell scripts in /etc/init.d that run on run-level changes. Run levels probably make most sense if you think of Ye Olde Mainframe booting: first it initializes core services, then…

Debian already has dependency based boot based on magic comments at the top for their syvinit scripts. The program used is called insserv and is something they got from Suse.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#85

Post by shimon_e »

nixgeek wrote: post #7
_wmd wrote: post #6

I wonder how long upstart will survive in Ubuntu after the next Debian stable

Probably a while, Ubuntu isn't too prone to changing things just because Debian (upstream) decided to do something.

Do you think ubuntu will be hiring package maintainers to rewrite all the init scripts so it can continue importing debian packages into universe?

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#87

Post by Gibheer »

_ak wrote: post #79
jordigh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd is basically launchd for Linux (and only Linux). The systemd devs make no apology about the launchd inspiration.

IIRC, when a presentation a few years ago at Chaos Communication Congress revealed systemd security issues, Lennart Poettering argued that these issues aren't a problem because they're resolved on Solaris and will be as soon as Linux gets some additional security mechanism. That sounded to me like systemd would also (theoretically) support Solaris.

Solaris had an init system like systemd for some years, called SMF. It was first released in 2005, the same year Apple released launchd.

It features service dependencies, log collection, fault detection and much more. One of the biggest differences is probably the usage of config files. SMF uses XML files to describe the service and its variables and a program called svcprop to edit variables and create new instances of the service. These can then be managed with svcadm.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#89

Post by goldenkey »

jtchang wrote: post #17

Can anyone give a quick rundown of the different init systems? For the most part it can get confusing for a non day to day system administrator when I am trying to get a program to "run on boot". Between rc.local, init.d, run levels, etc. sometimes it is just frustrating.

cron's @reboot is very handy

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#90

Post by oblio »

kashchei wrote: post #77

I have to remind everyone that the author of systemd is Lennart Poettering, the guy behind Pulseaudio. I think, this is one "feature" that should outweigh all supposed benefits of this program. For those unfamiliar with Pulseaudio development, it's a third-generation audio subsystem (after OSS and ALSA with JACK forming two previous ones, and ESD being the beginning of the third) that is famous for overcomplicated, n…

I find hard to read such comments and think that they are valuable contributions anymore.

First of all, Pulseaudio was not the biggest success, true, but can't someone learn from their mistakes? Both are also living, moving software products that continue to improve, as you said, "development marred with huge number of bugs that ruined audio on Linux until recently" - key words: "until recently".

Secondly, about the technical aspects:

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ -> "The systemd for Administrators Blog Series"

Lennard Poettering said it better than I ever will.

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