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Systemd redux: The end of Linux

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Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#111

Post by digi_owl »

simoncion wrote: post #72
gnufied wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from same article: "Apparently GDM 3.8 assumes that an init system will also clean up any processes it started. This is what systemd does, but OpenRC didn’t support that. Which means that GDM under OpenRC would leave lingering processes around, making it impossible to restart/shutdown GDM properly. The Gentoo GNOME packagers had to add this ability to OpenRC themselves. Then there were various other small little bugs…

Unless you're ovitters, I never claimed that you claimed that Gnome requires systemd. You did -however- say that "...when Gentoo developers tried integrating OpenRC they ran into too many bugs." Your statement is not true. Stable Gentoo had its default init system switched to OpenRC in mid 2011. OpenRC has been great for Gentoo. "Apparently GDM 3.8 assumes that an init system will also clean up any processes it start…

I find myself reminded of a poster at a school toilet: "your mother does not work here, clean up after yourself".

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#112

Post by XorNot »

lokedhs wrote: post #78
Mikeb85 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so terrible (literally the devil incarnate, sacrifice your offspring now) that it's already been adopted by: - Arch Linux - Fedora/RHEL - openSUSE/SLES - Mageia - NixOS - CoreOS - Sabayon - Debian and Ubuntu in the near future > Everything I read about SystemD is negative. Negative on the technology, negative on the people who created it. Nothing positive. There's a vocal group that seem to think it's some Red H…

Solaris does not use systemd. It uses systemctl. I'll leave it to others to debate their individual merits, but I personally like the Solaris system a lot.

systemctl is pretty obviously the inspiration for a lot of things in systemd though. The idea that one or the other is better is up for the debate, but they're both based on the same idea.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#113

Post by XorNot »

wazoox wrote: post #89
dredmorbius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the more reason to be judicious in what new technologies are introduced. One of the huge benefits of the Unix/Linux, CLI, and Free Software traditions is that they tend to be very strongly preserving of established knowledge . Changes are incremental, usually additive, a reliance on scripting means that interfaces are unlikely to change, and new tools are very frequently drop-in replacements for old. As specific…

Exactly that. You know what's insanely great? When you watch this presentation video of 1978 at AT&T where Ken Thomson explains Unix and type some commands on his VT-52 and you think: all of this is still current knowledge, and all of his explanations still hold true. Just like celestial mechanics or Pythagorean theorems. We are heirs of this ancient wisdom and this is friggin good , this is culture .

And systemd is changing precisely none of that.

Nothing about systemd removes the basic unix command line. Because he's most definitely not explaining the init system, which wouldn't have been the same from year to year then, or even similar decade to decade.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#114

Post by hwh »

zackelan wrote: post #98
AaronFriel wrote: post #80

Perhaps this is a controversial idea, but is this not just someone finally taking the tried and true Open Source "advice" to heart? That is, every time I've reported something is broken, wonky, doesn't work reliably, et cetera, I've been told, "Submit a patch.", "Write some code.", or worse, "Implement it yourself." Someone finally got fed up with the haphazard state of affairs in Linux-land. Fed up with the fragment…

I completely agree with you that Lennart scratched an itch, which is the way all good software gets started, and others picked up on it. Where I think the systemd-naysayers have a valid point is around the tight coupling that has been introduced, and is still being introduced, between systemd and various other components of a fully functional Linux system. To take your "just submit a patch" example - say N years from…

Well, the very distro-specific bunch of scripts in /etc/init.d (or is it /etc/rc.d/init.d/? or /etc/rc.d? or a symlink to ...?) were some kind of tight coupling, too.

Plus: This tight coupling did not exactly replace existing communication features. It created new ones. These are made use of.

Yes, systemd is bringing lots of new functionality. Under the hood - that is why sysadmins love or loathe it and users mostly don't care. That "tight integration" argument is mostly one that comes from people (please do not take offence, you're weighting it carefully indeed!) who bemoan that other userspace system infrastructure is left behind feature-wise. And those who love to argue about and against design decisions.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#115

Post by teekert »

api wrote: post #2

One thing I've realized about the Linux community through all this systemd flame warring is how unbelievably conservative a large subsection of it is. There's this huge so-called "neckbeard" continent that views anything architecturally beyond the 1980s as a huge affront to Unix. IMHO I kind of shrug at this, since Unix was never really all that great to begin with. Unix won because the only commercially viable and w…

I completely agree. Having played with Docker on CoreOS for some weeks now I see that it will push a much bigger and different change than systemd, which, on my Arch box was just an update with no real problems, I just had to learn some new commands.

Docker though... man how different it is and how clean it makes my system feel. I do feel that Docker will move towards some kind of Docker optimized minimal dockers that are not Debian or Ubuntu or what ever, that is just a stage so you feel some familiarity.

CoreOS meanwhile, who will ever touch its init system except to auto-start containers? Which will be done by nice tool which hides systemd in the future I guess.

Ok, my posts does focus on the server side of course.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#116

Post by nitrogen »

fidotron wrote: post #9
keyle wrote: post #3

Can someone put in Layman's terms what the change entails and why it would be the end of Linux?

It's not the end of Linux. It's the final death of the idea that Linux should just idly continue to act like a clone of some vague Unix of old because it was better when men were men and their computers had obscure RISC processors with billions of registers. Linux hasn't really been that way for an incredibly long time, but a large proportion of the userbase still cling to this notion, some for ideological reasons, a…

Systemd is most problematic because of its own-everything monolithic nature, and the changing of kernel interfaces to match. The vast majority of Linux systems are not desktops, and probably not servers either. The kernel and the core utilities around it (like init) should be designed with multiple implementations and all machine types in mind. This means phones, set top boxes, TVs, routers, automation hardware, supercomputers, and more.

If the core utilities around the kernel and the interfaces they use are well-documented, designed, and modular, then different machine types can pick and choose the components they need, and easily write their own by opening a well-defined API on something in /dev. If systemd continues to take over and alternatives smothered, very quickly the kernel will become useless to any system where systemd makes no sense, especially non-desktop embedded systems.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#117

Post by paulfurtado »

badgersandjam wrote: post #95
AaronFriel wrote: post #80

Perhaps this is a controversial idea, but is this not just someone finally taking the tried and true Open Source "advice" to heart? That is, every time I've reported something is broken, wonky, doesn't work reliably, et cetera, I've been told, "Submit a patch.", "Write some code.", or worse, "Implement it yourself." Someone finally got fed up with the haphazard state of affairs in Linux-land. Fed up with the fragment…

I had no opinion on systemd until yesterday. In fact I had a glace or two at the code and it's pretty clean and I liked the rough objectives laid out. I installed CentOS 7 on a machine last night that we're replacing CentOS 6 on and was poked in the face with timedatectl and dbus problems for an entire hour, some of which were intermittent. Debugging these issues is a horrific pain. I lost 4 hours on it. I've never l…

Out of curiosity, what ended up being the root cause of the timedatectl problem?

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#119

Post by nitrogen »

johnny22 wrote: post #99
fapjacks wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lennart Poettering works for Red Hat, btw.

so? that doesn't make systemd automatically stable enough to be used on redhat's flagship product.

This line of reasoning is drifting dangerously close to the conformist call of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" or in this case, RedHat. If systemd turns out to be a mistake in RHEL, it wouldn't be the first time something enterprisey did something wrong. We (Linux users) can't afford to let enterprise thinking, which is often more political than technical, dominate the community.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#120

Post by pjmlp »

wazoox wrote: post #89
dredmorbius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the more reason to be judicious in what new technologies are introduced. One of the huge benefits of the Unix/Linux, CLI, and Free Software traditions is that they tend to be very strongly preserving of established knowledge . Changes are incremental, usually additive, a reliance on scripting means that interfaces are unlikely to change, and new tools are very frequently drop-in replacements for old. As specific…

Exactly that. You know what's insanely great? When you watch this presentation video of 1978 at AT&T where Ken Thomson explains Unix and type some commands on his VT-52 and you think: all of this is still current knowledge, and all of his explanations still hold true. Just like celestial mechanics or Pythagorean theorems. We are heirs of this ancient wisdom and this is friggin good , this is culture .

What can I say, some people in 2014 like to live in 1978.

It was fun for a while, but I grew out of it.

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