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Without Systemd

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Re: Without Systemd

#11

Post by vezzy-fnord »

tdicola wrote: post #7
agumonkey wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprising, what does `systemd-analyze blame` says ?

Oh neat, had no idea about that command. Looks like these two are the big time sinks: 6.340s systemd-udev-settle.service 6.232s NetworkManager-wait-online.service Everything after that is under 250ms or so. Interesting that udev and network manager are taking so long during boot.

udevsettle is a hack that waits for the kevent queue to finish. I believe the justification for it was that certain volume and storage technologies on Linux act in a synchronous probing fashion that expect all devices to be up simultaneously before initializing. It's frequently mentioned as a bottleneck, including here: https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/Optimizati...

As for NetworkManager's wait online service, see what timeout has been set inside the unit file, and try lowering it. Though I suspect this might be yet another hack implemented as a synchronization point for network-dependent services to initialize properly, given just how finicky it is to define what a "network is up" state actually entails.

Re: Without Systemd

#12

Post by blueflow »

agumonkey wrote: post #10
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the systemd guys want to build with the unix philosophy. I don't have a definitive source (maybe SE radio podcast?) but I seem to remember one of the authors saying as much. They're more interested in what Linux can become than what unix was. Not that I agree, but I believe that's what they said.

Lennart Poettering has a different view on Unix philosophy, it's more 'make it interesting and do what you need to'. I think nobody is right or wrong. This is all growing pain and, as I often say, at the right time I'm sure there will be tinier systemd-like built to be more Unixy (as in 'small set of smaller composable tools').

Something like systemd except being ONLY an init system would be really great.

Re: Without Systemd

#13

Post by nextos »

tdicola wrote: post #2

I'm looking forward to 2 or 3 years from now when we can look back and laugh at all the fear and apprehension about systemd. That said though, I did just recently upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 (which is all systemd now) and it is noticeably slower to boot up compared to my old upstart-based 14.04 LTS install. Hopefully there's some more optimization that needs to be done to bring the boot-up speed to parity with the previo…

I like many things systemd has brought.

However, I think the app-ification they are planning to deploy in Linux systems is extremely dangerous. Essentially they are implementing app bundles as containers [1].

All good lessons learnt from package managers? Gone. Nix? Forgotten.

Imagine a heartbleed like scenario. In a controlled situation with a distro that uses a package manager this is easy to fix. Just upgrade the compromised package. Now think what happens if you have 20 different containers running 20 different userlands...

It's really scary. Linux has become such a nice OS partly because many distros created great package management tools.

These systemd guys make things terribly complex for no reason. Systemd itself is a monster running as PID 1, which is not very wise from a security perspective either. Pulseaudio is slow and unreliable. Dbus is quite inefficient. Etc.

Things are getting ugly. They are messing up with the Linux userland and ignoring core Unix principles.

[1] http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu...

Re: Without Systemd

#14

Post by chris_wot »

badsock wrote: post #9
tdicola wrote: post #2

I'm looking forward to 2 or 3 years from now when we can look back and laugh at all the fear and apprehension about systemd. That said though, I did just recently upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 (which is all systemd now) and it is noticeably slower to boot up compared to my old upstart-based 14.04 LTS install. Hopefully there's some more optimization that needs to be done to bring the boot-up speed to parity with the previo…

I have the feeling that things will settle into a Microsoft-like "things mostly work, most of the time, because so much effort was put into it rather than good design" kind of world. Sort of like how PulseAudio is now. Most people are cool with that kind of OS, so I don't think there will be much more than occasional grumbling. People like me who can't stand it will all have left.

Pulseaudio had bugs which caused problems, but what in particular is it about the design of PA that is flawed?

Re: Without Systemd

#15

Post by blueflow »

badsock wrote: post #9
tdicola wrote: post #2

I'm looking forward to 2 or 3 years from now when we can look back and laugh at all the fear and apprehension about systemd. That said though, I did just recently upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 (which is all systemd now) and it is noticeably slower to boot up compared to my old upstart-based 14.04 LTS install. Hopefully there's some more optimization that needs to be done to bring the boot-up speed to parity with the previo…

I have the feeling that things will settle into a Microsoft-like "things mostly work, most of the time, because so much effort was put into it rather than good design" kind of world. Sort of like how PulseAudio is now. Most people are cool with that kind of OS, so I don't think there will be much more than occasional grumbling. People like me who can't stand it will all have left.

Similar feelings here, this "it kinda works"-feeling was the reason why I switched to Linux in the first place. What are your plans? Where do you go when you 'leave'?

Re: Without Systemd

#16

Post by nextos »

tdicola wrote: post #7
agumonkey wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprising, what does `systemd-analyze blame` says ?

Oh neat, had no idea about that command. Looks like these two are the big time sinks: 6.340s systemd-udev-settle.service 6.232s NetworkManager-wait-online.service Everything after that is under 250ms or so. Interesting that udev and network manager are taking so long during boot.

NetworkManager, and most other net daemons suck. I had almost lost hope till I found connman [1].

It's implemented by Intel and used in many mobiles. It has it's own _absurdly_ fast DHCP client. It manages many network interfaces flawlessly and it's really lightweight. Give it a try.

[1] https://01.org/connman

Re: Without Systemd

#17

Post by chris_wot »

blackle wrote: post #4
blueflow wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like that you can now use systemd-cat with logfiles because regular cat doesn't fit anymore.

really unix philosophy, isn't it?

Sounds exactly like the Unix philosophy - cat is to concatenate files or standard input to standard output. If you took the binary format of systemd log files then it would output binary data to stdout.

Possibly you are unhappy with binary logs - I'm not very enamoured with them either. Perhaps you don't like the name of that executable. But you can't say it isn't doing the one thing - your issue is not around the Unix philosophy but rather the design decisions of systemd.

Re: Without Systemd

#18

Post by Jach »

blueflow wrote: post #15
badsock wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the feeling that things will settle into a Microsoft-like "things mostly work, most of the time, because so much effort was put into it rather than good design" kind of world. Sort of like how PulseAudio is now. Most people are cool with that kind of OS, so I don't think there will be much more than occasional grumbling. People like me who can't stand it will all have left.

Similar feelings here, this "it kinda works"-feeling was the reason why I switched to Linux in the first place. What are your plans? Where do you go when you 'leave'?

To a distro that doesn't force things down the throats of its users in the same degree Ubuntu et al. do. e.g. Gentoo. (You can even run a FreeBSD kernel in Gentoo if you want.)

That isn't to say it's been all rosy in Gentoo-land. It was an effort to keep Gnome3 off my system, to keep the existing Gnome2 versions of everything until MATE (and the Gentoo community packaging) was ready enough to replace Gnome2. But my system is happily free of Gnome3, systemd, and pulseaudio. And because Gentoo doesn't really have release versions, I can keep my other packages up to date indefinitely.

Re: Without Systemd

#19

Post by rascul »

blueflow wrote: post #12
agumonkey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lennart Poettering has a different view on Unix philosophy, it's more 'make it interesting and do what you need to'. I think nobody is right or wrong. This is all growing pain and, as I often say, at the right time I'm sure there will be tinier systemd-like built to be more Unixy (as in 'small set of smaller composable tools').

Something like systemd except being ONLY an init system would be really great.

http://uselessd.darknedgy.net

Re: Without Systemd

#20

Post by pdkl95 »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #6
blackle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really unix philosophy, isn't it?

I'm not sure the systemd guys want to build with the unix philosophy. I don't have a definitive source (maybe SE radio podcast?) but I seem to remember one of the authors saying as much. They're more interested in what Linux can become than what unix was. Not that I agree, but I believe that's what they said.

Most of the systemd people arguing about the unix philosophy have no idea what that philosophy is[1]. A common argument is to insist that breaking up systemd into a separate binaries made "not monolithic", while ignoring that the design is still totally interdependent.

Linux has become a victim of it's own success. It's popularity has brought in a new generation of people that learned about computers from Microsoft and Apple and they are bringing the "design" ideas of that world with them because they usually have never learned the basics of what unix is and why so many people use it.

Don't get me wrong - if they want to make a community-developed OS in the windows-style, they should! If that solves their problems better than a unix, then I wish them well and hope the project succeeds. The problem I have is that instead of starting/forking their own project, they are trying to trying to redirect Linux at the expense of those of us that have been here since the kernel 1.2.13 days[2] because it was a unix. Instead of being a separate project, we get to deal with misinformation and bad design, while being labeled a "hater" for wanting to use a working unix instead of the systemd vision of the future[3].

/Sigh/

"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." (Henry Spencer)

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

[2] Slackware was already on version 3.0!

[3] http://0pointer.de/public/gnomeasia2014.pdf

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