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What to expect from Debian/Trixie

michael-prokop.at

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Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#131

Post by progmetaldev »

pmontra wrote: post #90
tsimionescu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sane thing is to have swap enabled. Having swap "disabled" forces your system to swap out executables to disk, since these are likely the only memory-mapped files you have. So, if your memory fills up, you get catastrophic thrashing of the instruction cache. If you're lucky, you really go over available memory, and the OOMKiller kills some random process. But if you're not, your system will keep chugging along at…

I've been running with swap off since my first SSD in 2015 or 2016. 16 GB RAM, then 32. No problems at all. If I see RAM close to 30 GB I restart my browser and go back to 20 GB or less. Not every month.

Are you running your own system for personal use, a service available to the public, or both? Do you normally see your system used consistently, or does it get used differently (and in random ways)?

Since you state you're running a browser, I assume you mean for personal use. Unfortunately, when you run a service open to the public, you can find all kinds of odd traffic even for normal low-memory services. Sometimes you'll get hit with an aggressive bot looking for an exploit, and a lot of those bots don't care if they get blocked, because they are built to absolutely crush a system with exploits or login attempts where they are only blocked by the system crashing.

I'd say that most bots are this aggressive, because the old school "script kiddies", or now it's just AI-enabled aggressors, just run code without understanding things. It's easier than ever to run an attack against a range of IP addresses looking for vulnerabilities, that can be chained into a LLM to generate code that can be run easily.

Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#132

Post by JdeBP »

sherr wrote: post #16

Looking forward to the release. I use Debian Stable on almost all the systems I use (one is stuck on 10/Buster due to MoinMoin). I installed Trixie in a container last week, using an LXC container downloaded from linuxcontainers.org [1]. Three things I noted on the basic install : 1) Ping didn't work due to changed security settings (iputils-ping) [2] 2) OpenSSH server was installed as systemd socket activated and so…

I suspect that systemd people are looking at this thread in perplexity, and probably doing their thing (that I've seen over the years) of regarding the world of Debian as being amazingly behind the times in places.

The SSH server being a socket unit with systemd doing all of the socket parallelism-limiting and accepting was one of the earliest examples of socket activation ever given in systemd. It was in one of Lennart Poettering's earliest writings on the subject back in 2011.

* https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/inetd.html

And even that wasn't the earliest discussion of this way of running SSH by a long shot, as this was old news even before systemd was invented. One can go back years earlier than even Barrett's, Silverman's, and Byrnes's SSH: The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide published in 2005, which is one of many places explaining that lots of options in sshd_config get ignored when SSH is started by something else that does all of the socket stuff.

Like inetd.

This has been the case ever since it has been possible to put an SSH server together with inetd in "nowait" mode. Some enterprising computer historian might one day find out when the earliest mention of this was. It might even be in the original 1990s INSTALL file for SSH.

Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#133

Post by rodgerd »

JdeBP wrote: post #132
sherr wrote: post #16

Looking forward to the release. I use Debian Stable on almost all the systems I use (one is stuck on 10/Buster due to MoinMoin). I installed Trixie in a container last week, using an LXC container downloaded from linuxcontainers.org [1]. Three things I noted on the basic install : 1) Ping didn't work due to changed security settings (iputils-ping) [2] 2) OpenSSH server was installed as systemd socket activated and so…

I suspect that systemd people are looking at this thread in perplexity, and probably doing their thing (that I've seen over the years) of regarding the world of Debian as being amazingly behind the times in places. The SSH server being a socket unit with systemd doing all of the socket parallelism-limiting and accepting was one of the earliest examples of socket activation ever given in systemd. It was in one of Lenn…

As you say, network programs activating from a master network management is, of course, the history of Unix. It's ironic to see knee-jerk complaints about it.

Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#134

Post by h4kunamata »

What to expect??

The usual: light, stable and functional. I run older version as my DNS servers and homelad stuff, opensource 3D printer, etc. Debian just works with no dramas. I run it in text mode only so boot takes what ~3-5 seconds.

Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#135

Post by pavon »

dijit wrote: post #63
blueflow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank god you can enable and disable each of these components in complete isolation, so you don't suffer any kind of lock-in from systemd.

fighting your distro in practice is a total nightmare.

I've not had any problems with swapping out systemd-* with other packages, including -coredump, -cron, -oomd, -resolved or -timesyncd. Even journald was fairly painless to swap out. Unlike systemd itself, the distros' approach them not so much as a core part of the userland, but as lightweight basic implementations that meet many user's needs, but which are in no way a replacement for more fully-functional implementations.

Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#136

Post by tsimionescu »

pmontra wrote: post #90
tsimionescu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sane thing is to have swap enabled. Having swap "disabled" forces your system to swap out executables to disk, since these are likely the only memory-mapped files you have. So, if your memory fills up, you get catastrophic thrashing of the instruction cache. If you're lucky, you really go over available memory, and the OOMKiller kills some random process. But if you're not, your system will keep chugging along at…

I've been running with swap off since my first SSD in 2015 or 2016. 16 GB RAM, then 32. No problems at all. If I see RAM close to 30 GB I restart my browser and go back to 20 GB or less. Not every month.

Sure, if your working set always fits in RAM, you won't have problems. You wouldn't have problems with swap enabled, either.

It's only when you're consistently at the limit of how much RAM you have available that the differences start to matter. If you want to run a ~30GB +- 10% workload on a system with 32GB of RAM, then you'll get to find out how stable it is with VS without swap.

Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#137

Post by spookie »

dijit wrote: post #63
blueflow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank god you can enable and disable each of these components in complete isolation, so you don't suffer any kind of lock-in from systemd.

fighting your distro in practice is a total nightmare.

There are reasonable ones out there. Just use a well maintained one that aligns with you.

Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#138

Post by spookie »

b112 wrote: post #85
yehoshuapw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up in gentoo mostly just to avoid systemd (used it before, mostly to learn. went to debian for new laptop. gave up after fighting systemd. I'm aware of devuan and artix, but gentoo just worked (after all the time spent))

Debian, at least until bookworm works perfectly without systemd. The easiest way to make this transition, is to installed Debian with nothing but 'standard system utilities' and 'SSH server' (if you want) during install: https://forum.qubes-os.org/uploads/db3820/original/2X/c/c774... Once install is done, login and save this file: /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd # this is the only systemd package that is required, so…

Have you looked at Devuan? Genuinely a good experience.

Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#139

Post by spookie »

LooseMarmoset wrote: post #57
blueflow wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank god you can enable and disable each of these components in complete isolation, so you don't suffer any kind of lock-in from systemd.

devuan saved just enough of my sanity for me to function

Yeah, pretty incredible distro. Some rough edges here and there but man, even maintenance is a dream. It's just plain simpler to diagnose, and actually control what the system does. Instead of having to go down abstraction hell land.

Don't get me wrong, systemd is cool. But my god people really abuse of it. Especially distros. Some really make it hard to understand what service is in actual control. Why wrap daemons in daemons in daemons? With the worst possible names and descriptions to boot.

Re: What to expect from Debian/Trixie

#140

Post by pmontra »

progmetaldev wrote: post #131
pmontra wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running with swap off since my first SSD in 2015 or 2016. 16 GB RAM, then 32. No problems at all. If I see RAM close to 30 GB I restart my browser and go back to 20 GB or less. Not every month.

Are you running your own system for personal use, a service available to the public, or both? Do you normally see your system used consistently, or does it get used differently (and in random ways)? Since you state you're running a browser, I assume you mean for personal use. Unfortunately, when you run a service open to the public, you can find all kinds of odd traffic even for normal low-memory services. Sometimes…

That's my laptop. I'll check what my customers do on their servers, but all of them have a login screen on the home page of their services. Only one of them have a registration screen. Those are the servers I have access to. Their corporate sites run on WordPress and I don't know how those servers are configured.

Anyway, I'd also enable swap on public facing servers.

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