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Why systemd?

blog.jorgenschaefer.de

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Re: Why systemd?

#201

Post by Alupis »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #99
uselessdguy wrote: post #51

Disclaimer: I develop uselessd, probably have a warped mindset from being a Luddite who values transparency, and evil stuff like that. The author of this piece makes the classic mistake of equating the init system as the process manager and process supervisor. These are, in fact, all separate stages. The init system runs as PID 1 and strictly speaking, the sole responsibility is to daemonize, reap its children, set t…

> The author of this piece makes the classic mistake > of equating the init system as the process manager > and process supervisor. I think it is a bit more subtle than that. The author makes the mistake of inferring an architecture from observed behavior and fails to ascertain where the warts come from, the architecture or the implementation. They aren't the only one, its a common problem. The result though is kind…

Getting tired over all the systemd hate. If you don't like it, don't use it. Instead of complaining and making useless-by-design wrappers and/or dumbed-down-versions, why not focus your efforts on making a new better init system and convincing people they should use it instead. systemd isn't final - it's software, and will come and go.

Not to mention, most of the systemd hate seems to be spread by only two main sources now, and both cite each other as sources (ironic a little).[1]

[1] http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/66417/systemd-haters-bust...

systemd was really designed with servers in mind, and really does bring a lot to the table for server admins.

Re: Why systemd?

#202

Post by dalias »

nextos wrote: post #3

We often criticise systemd for being too bloated, and making it hard to write a drop in replacement. I totally agree with this line of thought. However, in my mind it has made several awesome things possible. My boot time got dramatically shorter when I adopted it thanks to parallelization. Besides, daemons have now simple and robust service definitions. Sys V had become a mess! Lastly, lightweight containers are the…

If your boot time was bad before and decent now, this is not thanks to the goodness of systemd but rather the badness of whatever hideous system your distro was using before, and/or because your distro is starting a bunch of useless junk that shouldn't be running in the first place. I've been using flat /etc/rc (all commands in one file, & at the end of anything non-essential) for years (decades?) now, and have always had a login prompt faster than the display can synchronize to the video mode change.

Re: Why systemd?

#203

Post by dalias »

rdtsc wrote: post #76
smutticus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's this kind of crap that scares me away from systemd. I have no problems working with current init structures, so I gain nothing from systemd. It basically just removes options from me, and gives me nothing in return that I actually want. What we ultimately lose with systemd is modularity. If we cannot upgrade systemd without also upgrading the kernel, then systemd might as well be considered part of the kernel.

Modularity and isolation is at the core of reliability. I think it is worthy discussion if a tradeoff beteween 30 sec and 15 sec boot time is worth that sometimes your boot process might lock up. I think there was already at least one visible problem with systemd stepping on kernel developer's toes (so to speak) by re-using one of the debug flags. Heck kernel is monolithic. But thinkign about it, I trust kernel devel…

The choice isn't between 30sec or 15sec boot times. It's between 30sec, 15sec, or 1sec boot times, the latter coming from dropping all of the crap and writing a flat linear /etc/rc file.

Re: Why systemd?

#204

Post by uselessdguy »

chousuke wrote: post #133
lmm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom" Systemd has made it impossible for me to run an up-to-date Gnome on FreeBSD. That feels a lot like taking away my freedom.

You're blaming the wrong party here. The systemd project has no control over what Gnome relies on. They independently rely on systemd because it provides functionality that makes their lives easier, and it's their right to do that. If you want "up-to-date Gnome" to work on FreeBSD, go and write some code to help make it happen.

Except that Lennart Poettering (at the least) was directly involved in negotiating the dependency on systemd's libraries for the GNOME stack: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-May/...

Considering GNOME is part of the new school design philosophy in general and largely developed by Red Hat employees, it's inevitable that it would have happened anyway, but the systemd developers were directly complicit in speeding it up.

Re: Why systemd?

#205

Post by imanaccount247 »

Alupis wrote: post #201
ChuckMcM wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author of this piece makes the classic mistake > of equating the init system as the process manager > and process supervisor. I think it is a bit more subtle than that. The author makes the mistake of inferring an architecture from observed behavior and fails to ascertain where the warts come from, the architecture or the implementation. They aren't the only one, its a common problem. The result though is kind…

Getting tired over all the systemd hate. If you don't like it, don't use it. Instead of complaining and making useless-by-design wrappers and/or dumbed-down-versions, why not focus your efforts on making a new better init system and convincing people they should use it instead. systemd isn't final - it's software, and will come and go. Not to mention, most of the systemd hate seems to be spread by only two main sourc…

Characterizing criticism as "hate" is fallacious and serves the opposite function of what you wish. People see support of systemd as being just ignorance and whining. If you want to support systemd, then do it with actual arguments.

Re: Why systemd?

#206

Post by cwyers »

lmm wrote: post #187
chousuke wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real option actually is to bring up FreeBSD to the level that it can provide the same functionality (specifically, dbus interfaces) as systemd and Linux. Gnome depends on systemd features because they're useful and solve real problems. As it is, FreeBSD can't provide those features. You can of course make the case that the interfaces provided by systemd are substandard, but so long as you don't have an alternativ…

FreeBSD can and does provide these interfaces. We've had e.g. cgroups-equivalents for years . The reason systemd doesn't run on FreeBSD is pure politics, not technical - after all, if it were technically impossible to implement systemd on FreeBSD, there would be no need for a policy of refusing patches. > You can of course make the case that the interfaces provided by systemd are substandard, but so long as you don't…

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

"That is simply not true. Porting systemd to other kernel is not feasible. We just use too many Linux-specific interfaces. For a few one might find replacements on other kernels, some features one might want to turn off, but for most this is nor really possible. Here's a small, very incomprehensive list: cgroups, fanotify, umount2(), /proc/self/mountinfo (including notification), /dev/swaps (same), udev, netlink, the structure of /sys, /proc/$PID/comm, /proc/$PID/cmdline, /proc/$PID/loginuid, /proc/$PID/stat, /proc/$PID/session, /proc/$PID/exe, /proc/$PID/fd, tmpfs, devtmpfs, capabilities, namespaces of all kinds, various prctl()s, numerous ioctls, the mount() system call and its semantics, selinux, audit, inotify, statfs, O_DIRECTORY, O_NOATIME, /proc/$PID/root, waitid(), SCM_CREDENTIALS, SCM_RIGHTS, mkostemp(), /dev/input, ..."

It's not just cgroups.

Re: Why systemd?

#207

Post by imanaccount247 »

earlz wrote: post #188
ultramancool wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. I recently migrated to FreeBSD after trying sytemd on Arch and seeing that Debian and Ubuntu are planning to move too. The dead simple rc.conf file seems so much nicer than the stuff I was dealing with in the entire world of Linux-based systems, like going back to the way Arch used to be when I really liked it.

The really sad thing is that Arch Linux use to pride itself on being BSD-like. It used a similar rc.conf system. Each service had exactly one init script, not the weird multiple file init script system Debian has. Before systemd, Arch was the closest you could get to BSD simplicity on Linux

Slackware and gentoo have both been closer for a very long time.

Re: Why systemd?

#208

Post by uselessdguy »

dalias wrote: post #199
exDM69 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! What the systemd "discussion" has been missing is viable alternatives that are somewhat comparable in features. Most of the flamewar is focused on people who consider the problems that systemd tries to solve non-issues. There are some real issues being pointed out (particularly regarding monolithic design) but no-one has attempted to actually fix that in any way (in code, that is). While it is unlikely that I wi…

There are plenty of viable alternatives: s6, runit, OpenRC, and so on. I'm not really convinced uselessd is a viable alternative - it keeps way too much of the badness of systemd, but I guess that makes it viable if you were willing to consider systemd to begin with. A much better solution for the problem of user-facing applications (e.g. "desktop environment" software) depending on systemd's public dbus interfaces i…

Hey, Rich. First of all, thanks for musl libc.

At the moment, yes. We do keep much of the internal systemd architecture in tact, but we do eventually aim on partially decoupling it, or at the very least expanding the breadth of configure prefixes for tuning its behavior. We are a pretty early stage project, after all.

Indeed, the systembsd and systemd-shim projects are working on the D-Bus interface reimplementation part.

Our goal right now is to be a minimal systemd base that can be plugged in interchangeably and have the vast majority of unit options be respected.

There already are systems that offer primitives to reuse systemd units. nosh is one of them, and there also exist scripts that can convert systemd services to SysV initscripts, and even the opposite (dshimv).

Re: Why systemd?

#209

Post by imanaccount247 »

dobbsbob wrote: post #178
RexRollman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been tinkering with NetBSD the last couple of weeks in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine and the RC system it uses it very nice. OpenBSD's is nice as well.

NetBSD can run as a xen dom0 host too though normally I use Alpine Linux/OpenRC as dom0 because it's so small.

>NetBSD can run as a xen dom0 host too

Isn't there a bunch of fine print that goes along with that?

>Alpine Linux

How? The installer doesn't even work.

Re: Why systemd?

#210

Post by loudmax »

Alupis wrote: post #201
ChuckMcM wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author of this piece makes the classic mistake > of equating the init system as the process manager > and process supervisor. I think it is a bit more subtle than that. The author makes the mistake of inferring an architecture from observed behavior and fails to ascertain where the warts come from, the architecture or the implementation. They aren't the only one, its a common problem. The result though is kind…

Getting tired over all the systemd hate. If you don't like it, don't use it. Instead of complaining and making useless-by-design wrappers and/or dumbed-down-versions, why not focus your efforts on making a new better init system and convincing people they should use it instead. systemd isn't final - it's software, and will come and go. Not to mention, most of the systemd hate seems to be spread by only two main sourc…

To avoid using systemd in practice basically means switching distributions, or switching away from Linux entirely. Depending on your setup, this may be far from trivial.

I think systemd has a lot going for it, and it's been pretty stable on my Arch notebook, but I'm not too thrilled with the way it takes over so many tasks at once and eschews text log files. What's frustrating is that I didn't have much choice in the matter. Yeah, I could switch to another distro, but since Red Hat, Suse, and now Debian and Ubuntu are switching to systemd, that leaves Gentoo or BSD or something. Which are perfectly fine in their own right, but that's pretty drastic if I just want to avoid systemd.

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