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.
Pulseaudio had bugs which caused problems, but what in particular is it about the design of PA that is flawed?
Without Systemd
31–40 of 89 posts
Re: Without Systemd
#32I'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…
I have yet to see a convincing argument for this. Is the binary bigger than other inits? Does it do that much more? Link please.
Re: Without Systemd
#33Voted down once, but most of the comments seem centered on desktop versus actual server installations. "pulse audio", "gnome 3", etc. How many people have experience with running systemd based servers in production and, if appropriate, at scale? Thoughts? Comparisons with tried and true components like syslog?
Concerning systemd as an init system, it's been extremely reliable and simple to use and manage. Writing unit files, even ones with complex requirements, is incredibly easy, because the FDO documentation is really terrific. For instance, we have a host running docker for services that are contingent on an NFS mount being present on the host: specifying a requirement on the mount-point for the docker service to boot-up is as simple as creating a docker.service.d directory and writing a 2-line drop-in unit file with RequiresMountsFor=/mount/path. Being able to add this functionality so easily, without having to assume total ownership of managing the rest of the service configuration really struck me as exemplary of the reasons systemd won the init wars. It really feels like it bends over backwards to help administrators get shit done, and done right.
Systemd also provides a lot more visibility into service behavior than other init systems i've worked with (logs tailed in status output, exit codes, real pid tracking, etc), which is very helpful in day-to-day work as an administrator. I'm also pretty regulary surprised by how fast our servers reboot, though that's a rather minor benefit. Mount units work just like it says on the tin, not much to report. We haven't started using any of the other systemd stuff like timers, but may do so as we encounter use-cases where it's preferable.
On the flip side, I'm not especially keen on journald. It makes it pretty rough to do system log aggregation out of the box. There's some plans to add the ability to forward logs to a remote server, but it's not there yet on CentOS. Rsyslog has nice integration on CentOS that can help make things resemble a more traditional log structure, but I can't speak to it's viability as we ended up using a more lightweight solution that uses journalds option to forward all message via syslog over a local socket (/run/systemd/journal/syslog) as an input for our log aggregator. It's irritating on occasion, but we've never not been able to work around it, and i'm confident that things will get better going forward, as journald gets more features and more log aggregators add support for polling the journal.
most importantly, i am really looking forward to Ubuntu 16.04 coming out with systemd, at which time Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS and more will all use the same init system in an LTS release. as a regular author of open-source chef cookbooks, it's exciting to think of a future where there's enough x-platform consistency that it's no longer necessary to special-case service management. along this same line, systemd unit aliases are also pretty awesome, and i hope package maintainers in both the rpm and deb world start working to add aliases for divergently named services (apache2 vs httpd, mysql vs mysqld, etc.).
ultimately, we're not dogmatic about the philosophy arguments, most of which at this point strike me as sour grapes. i just want a system that works reliably, is well documented, and makes it easy for me to get shit done. systemd fits that bill better than its predecessors, so we're happy using it until something better comes along :)
Re: Without Systemd
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
In all honesty, people who want a working Unix would have went to a BSD or Solaris variant a while ago. GNU/Linux, although historically mostly abiding by Unix principles, has always had syncretic aspects as early as the desktop environments experimenting with various fat RPC protocols over 15 years ago, and likely other precedents earlier. The introduction of the various storage abstraction layers like devfs and HAL…
This seems strangely backwards -- a lot of the "let's make this into files" philosophy like devfs, /proc, et. al. borrows from Plan 9, which is arguably more Unix than Unix; systemd on the other hand...
Re: Without Systemd
#35Earlier 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.
Pulseaudio had bugs which caused problems, but what in particular is it about the design of PA that is flawed?
Re: Without Systemd
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'?
I switched all my servers and desktops to FreeBSD. It's like going back in time in many, many good ways (commandline/text-config focus, less magic, etc.), and one bad way (HW support).
Re: Without Systemd
#37I'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…
No. Only a small part of systemd runs as PID 1. Systemd is not a monolith, it is a bunch of various utilities.
> However, I think the app-ification they are planning to deploy in Linux systems is extremely dangerous.
I agree. This sounds scary. However, it does not mean that distros will hurry to adopt this kind of system. I also get the impression that it is targeted more toward special use cases than intended to replace traditional package managers.
> Pulseaudio is slow and unreliable.
While anecdote is not data, I never had any issue with it.
> Dbus is quite inefficient.
They did not invent Dbus, and using the foremost userland IPC mechanism to communicate is not unreasonable (since, as mentioned above, systemd is a bunch of utilities, they do need some form of IPC). I don't think it has an impact in practice.
Re: Without Systemd
#38I'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…
This is exactly the same as the virtualization scenario, where you might have hundreds of possibly vulnerable virtual-machines running under the same virtualization platform (which maybe Linux). Or lots of Docker containers, some of which may have vulnerable software.
App-containerization is usually seen as having security benefits, as it promotes isolation.
Yes, package management tools are great. Containers are also great.
I can imagine a future world in which package management tools understood containers, and could choose how to apply updates (or not!) to nested containers.
Re: Without Systemd
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like systemd except being ONLY an init system would be really great.
http://uselessd.darknedgy.net
Re: Without Systemd
#40Voted down once, but most of the comments seem centered on desktop versus actual server installations. "pulse audio", "gnome 3", etc. How many people have experience with running systemd based servers in production and, if appropriate, at scale? Thoughts? Comparisons with tried and true components like syslog?
we run a ~70 node system, ~95% virtual/5% physical, almost fully converted from Scientific Linux 6 to CentOS 7 (only the NFS boxes left!), which is systemd based. Concerning systemd as an init system, it's been extremely reliable and simple to use and manage. Writing unit files, even ones with complex requirements, is incredibly easy, because the FDO documentation is really terrific. For instance, we have a host runn…
Your mention of requirements for service execution is certainly an interesting avenue for me to think about.
Honestly for my day to day "spin up VM, do some experiments/coding, fine tune" it doesn't matter. For some other work I am doing dealing with longer term system maintenance/administration, I've been slow to adapt.
Thanks for the insights.