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Systemd redux: The end of Linux

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Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#221

Post by badgersandjam »

rantanplan wrote: post #204
badgersandjam wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no problems the second time as well. Unfortunately when the first and second time differ even though identical (recorded) steps were performed, one has to ask the question: why and can I trust it?

Maybe it was a hardware problem on your end? My rule of thumb is "search for the problem on Google. If nothing comes up, maybe something is wrong on my end". Did you find any results or reported bugs similar to what you experienced?

The hardware is known good on CentOS 6.5. In fact it was high end HP kit that we pulled out of production.

Yes there were other mentions of it with notes to it being fixed in a later systemd drop, which we can't deploy because RH/CentOS don't ship it. I think one of our guys raised a case with RH but I was dragged off onto something else then.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#222

Post by icantthinkofone »

pjc50 wrote: post #171
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…

Or stop using Linux entirely and move to FreeBSD.

Linux Torvalds said he would never have created Linux is FreeBSD was available at the time. And the only reason it wasn't available is because it was embroiled in a lawsuit over embedded ATT UNIX code back in the 1990s(?).

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#223

Post by badgersandjam »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #194
badgersandjam wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bugzilla query against RHEL 7.0 systemd says otherwise: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_s... A lot of the bug descriptions are quite scarily bad when you consider them in context such as "various loginctl commands not working" etc.

So what you mean is "Systemd still has serious bugs," which is nothing to do with whether or not everybody is moving at once. That's the point – if systemd has important bugs they should be fixed . Clearly, the groups responsible for the decision have concluded that the tradeoff is worth it, and have accepted that a large, fundamental change will have issues. That's fine – there are a bunch of other distress you can…

The two are related.

People are shipping production operating systems with systemd that is chock full of bugs.

An all consuming tentacle monster like systemd is fine if you want to dogfood it but to throw at paying customers and/or supporters of your distribution is a little off key.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#224

Post by feld »

gtirloni wrote: post #131
badgersandjam wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It hardly does anything for FreeBSD in the enterprise world. Companies cannot afford to support Windows Server, Linux AND another flavor of UNIX (FreeBSD). They are already dumping Solaris/AIX/HP-UX as much as they can so environments are a bit more homogeneous (and easier to support). There is no point in onboarding FreeBSD for what they perceive as minor technical differences (that, truth be told, are overshadowed…

> They are already dumping Solaris/AIX/HP-UX as much as they can so environments are a bit more homogeneous (and easier to support).

Whoever is pushing for this is an idiot then. Verisign, for example, has had 100% DNS uptime for the .net, .org, and .com root servers for ~15 years because of their mixed environments. In every one of their POPs they tend to have at least two racks of equipment with:

   * 2 different brands of load balancers
   * 2 different brands of firewalls
   * 2 different brands of switches
   * 2 different brands of servers
    ** servers are from different hardware generations
   * 2 different OSes (Linux and FreeBSD)
   * a choice from 3 different DNS server software
This is all pretty much randomized at each location. As a result, a bug in one piece of the stack (hardware, software, driver, security, etc) will not take down their service completely.

This is how you run a reliable global-scale service. Anyone who plays the "it's just easier if we all use ____" is in for a big surprise when their entire infrastructure is at risk due to one bug.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#225

Post by icantthinkofone »

dgdsgdsg wrote: post #142

for me it seems that most people complaining/crying out loud come from a system admin perspective. For example the author of this blog article does not seem to have contribute a lot of code to any project and is more "just" an admin and not a dev. for me it looks like they don't like new stuff love the linux world how they knew it and don't want things to get easier or even change.

Complaining and crying from a system admin perspective is pretty significant.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#226

Post by jmnicolas »

badgersandjam wrote: post #193
moron4hire wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I caution you to not apply the word "engineering" to software, especially in the apparent manner you've been applying it to this thread. You seem to have an idea that there are universal software development practices that are so well understood we can make regulation around them. But that isn't how software works. There are some practices that are known and some that are unknown. For working software "engineers", we…

That sounds like an excuse which I don't accept. I have a formal engineering background and whilst you're fundamentally right, engineering is based upon cumulative experience gained. We have a hell of a lot of experience as a society of writing software that works and is of merchantable quality. What the general state of affairs shows is the following traits: 1) There is no thought and research going into the design…

It seems to me that OpenBSD stands for everything you want in OS dev, except maybe point 3, Theo seems really at the center of everything.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#227

Post by e40 »

olau wrote: post #159
badgersandjam wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you really extrapolating from ONE data point? In some sense systemd is more stable in that it's fixing some longstanding bugs with sysvinit, but of course it will have some bugs of it own. If you don't want to deal with that, you could skip a release.

it's fixing some longstanding bugs with sysvinit

Honest question: I've been using sysvinit for a very long time and I have no concept of what those bugs might be.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#228

Post by badgersandjam »

jmnicolas wrote: post #226
badgersandjam wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an excuse which I don't accept. I have a formal engineering background and whilst you're fundamentally right, engineering is based upon cumulative experience gained. We have a hell of a lot of experience as a society of writing software that works and is of merchantable quality. What the general state of affairs shows is the following traits: 1) There is no thought and research going into the design…

It seems to me that OpenBSD stands for everything you want in OS dev, except maybe point 3, Theo seems really at the center of everything.

You're 100% correct. In fact my own mail server/web machine uses it. Theo is not right at the centre; there's a large group of people who work together as equals from what I can see. I can't recommend it for our "enterprise use" though because we need some of the more friendly features that FreeBSD offers such as ZFS.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#229

Post by lmm »

hwh wrote: post #114
zackelan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Sure, but the coupling was contained. You could still run Gnome on any distro (or on non-linux), whichever way around your init scripts were.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#230

Post by dredmorbius »

mercurial wrote: post #187
wazoox wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

It's an interesting take, but that's not really how software works. Look at Plan9. It isn't POSIX compliant, but it does a lot of things much better than traditional Unix (or nowadays Linux, for that matter). Traditional Unix is not the philosopher's stone. There are plenty of good things about it, but it also comes with a number of dubious design decisions or what is now irrelevant cruft (why are we leaving with cod…

Plan9 is actually a really good example to bring up, for any number of reasons. I have to admit that I've never used it, though I've read bits about it. There are definitely some ideas in there that I'd like to play with and experience.

The most important elements to consider about Plan9 are these:

1. Plan9 wasn't Unix (nor was it Linux). It was its own OS, it was absolutely informed by Unix, and tried to learn from mistakes practiced in Unix. Because it wasn't Unix it provided for an independent test bed in which these ideas could be explored without disrupting a large established installed base and user community. And that is a key benefit of branched development. All of these I consider positives of Plan9.

2. It was hampered by an overbearing corporate control and licensing model. It was an ugly stepchild of AT&T's, under a proprietary license. The fact that it was under development kept it from being widely deployed (among other factors), the fact that it had a restricted license meant that other possible collaborators couldn't get involved.

When Linux emerged in the early 1990s, it had a lot of problems -- it was far from the best or most obvious Unix alternative out there (look up ESR's PC Unix guides from that era). But in a world of large proprietary Unicies priced far out of the hobbyist's range, a handful of small PC ports of varying quality, and BSD which was embroiled in its lawsuit with AT&T (speaking of Plan9), Linux was unencumbered, free, and (pretty quickly) available under the GPL. That gave it the critical mass to develop. As with Plan9, it was its own OS, providing a testbed environment for development, but also allowing stable cuts to be made for use in specific deployments as it reached sufficient states of readiness.

Which is to say: the community and development dynamics mattered a lot.

I'm seeing a far more troubled path for Systemd in this regard.

Also of note: in the Debian init system debate, a specific concern raised against upstart, one of the init alternatives, was its own requirement of a developer license grant to Canonical, which was seen as a strong demerit against upstart. As with Plan9, exercising too much proprietary control may well have cost Canonical critical votes in the Debian decision.

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