Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

techrepublic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 191 posts

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#181

Post by mobilio »

SahAssar wrote: post #61
mobilio wrote: post #37

systemd is good for desktop and server systems. But i was seeing that in Embedding Linux or IoT distributions that doesn't make sense since they're run on limited resources.

Well, systemd is great for responding to events (like devices and networks going up/down) so it seems like a good fit for embedded/IoT. If anything it'd be bad for servers since those are (usually) basically a couple of services and daemons brought up at boot and not changed during runtime, with a few interfaces that never change. Systemd is not that heavy to run when configured correctly (which is what the distro sh…

Well - Debian with systemd consume ~90MB ram. Debian w/o systemd consume ~40MB ram.

Device have 256MB.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#182

Post by Data_Junkie »

ses1984 wrote: post #178
Data_Junkie wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simpler for simple things, which is great when it works, but more complicated for more complicated work, which is simply unacceptable when it prevents you from controlling the system. Good old bad design that matters more as you scale up. It isn't the point of systemd that is the problem, it is this particular case of horrible design.

Can you give an example of something more complicated in systemd? If I ever had to do anything like that, I would just do it in a different layer, like have a simple systemd unit pointing to a complicated init script that contains the logic.

Well yeah, you would have to. Might as well use initv then. That's the point. At least then you can debug and not have a black box you can't really see into. It is horrid design. Hacker News is getting worse, same thing horrid design . Horrid design is caused by the goals and abilities of the designer clashing with the goals and abilities of the user, and when designers are selfish and want ALL the control the product if useful to less and less people over time. Happens a lot because often the design goal is a hidden desire to wall off functionality to reserve it's usefulness to a select group deemed worthy.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#183

Post by ses1984 »

Data_Junkie wrote: post #182
ses1984 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of something more complicated in systemd? If I ever had to do anything like that, I would just do it in a different layer, like have a simple systemd unit pointing to a complicated init script that contains the logic.

Well yeah, you would have to. Might as well use initv then. That's the point. At least then you can debug and not have a black box you can't really see into. It is horrid design. Hacker News is getting worse, same thing horrid design . Horrid design is caused by the goals and abilities of the designer clashing with the goals and abilities of the user, and when designers are selfish and want ALL the control the produc…

Except when would you have to? Please describe something you did that was complicated and hard to debug in systemd.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#184

Post by znpy »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #20
znpy wrote: post #3

I see a lot of hate about systems and I used to loathe it too. Then I took a course on systemd specifically and it opened my eyes, and now I'm quite fond about it. Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space. It has quirks and bugs like all software, but I think it works very well, all things considered. To those who say that it's…

> It's complex because it does a complex work Hence it's pointless because it doesn't make things any simpler. All it does is making things monolithic and wrapping concepts that are perfectly fine by themselves, forcing third-party software to write to systemd's APIs. > Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. "Managing systems" is not what is meant by "doing one thing, and doing it we…

Meh.

Most of the things you mention are side-components of systemd, not core stuff.

You could change the hostname the old way by just go ediding /etc/hostname or using the hostname command (or both). hostnamectl merely exposes you a handy command to do this in a consistent way across distributions.

One could probably take systemd, dropp all the non-init components and make it a minimal init system.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#185

Post by znpy »

ldng wrote: post #88
ses1984 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an end user, meaning a web app developer, I actually like systemd a lot. I perceive the software quality to be good enough. I've used it in production since 2014 and encountered zero bugs. It does seem to me to be vastly simpler compared to the old way of doing things. I don't really feel strongly either way. I'll be pretty sad if Debian and redhat diverge.

And that is exactly the marketing card that have been played. The dev out numbers the sysadmin and ask for SystemD. Then it's to the sysadmin to live with the numerous bugs and non-standard and hardly documented ways of the Beast.

> non-standard

I mean, this is a laughable point. Like, seriously ? Before systemd every branch of the linux distro tree had its own way of managing stuff at startup, and distros in the same subtreee made things different enough that things like inits-cripts were not portable.

Heck, even with the same init system, some distros arranged runlevels differently. Do people even remember runlevel? Those were another complete way of mess things up.

Are you really playing the "non standard" card? Like, for real?

And seriously, what would be the standard? The Single Unix Specification? According to that spec even bash is not standard, and yet it's the de-facto standard for shell scripts across basically all the major distributions.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#186

Post by znpy »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #64
ses1984 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an end user, meaning a web app developer, I actually like systemd a lot. I perceive the software quality to be good enough. I've used it in production since 2014 and encountered zero bugs. It does seem to me to be vastly simpler compared to the old way of doing things. I don't really feel strongly either way. I'll be pretty sad if Debian and redhat diverge.

I don't know what you're doing to start your web/app server, but for eg. apache httpd it's a matter of sudo apachectl start (and likewise for all SysV-like startup scripts). For node, it's node (or rather using node-forever or node-cluster in prod). If you want to have it started on boot automatically, you put that line into your startup script. It doesn't get any more simple and transparent than that. Why would you…

yup, sudo apachectl start. But...

how do you make sure it's done at boot? what if the machines boots up unattended, maybe after a power loss? and where do you put the apachectl binary? And what would happen if for any reason apache crashes? will it stay crashed? will something restart it? if so, what thing will? and what if you need to run it in a restricted environment (let's say something easy, let's say a chroot) ? and what if you want to have upper limits to the resources that it's supposed to use? how do you check if it's running, and how much resources is it consuming ?

Systemd units make all of those things trivial, or at least not that hard.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#187

Post by znpy »

pdkl95 wrote: post #17
znpy wrote: post #3

I see a lot of hate about systems and I used to loathe it too. Then I took a course on systemd specifically and it opened my eyes, and now I'm quite fond about it. Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space. It has quirks and bugs like all software, but I think it works very well, all things considered. To those who say that it's…

> does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system "managing the system" is not "ONE [problem]". A big part of the problem with systemd is this presupposition that management of something as large and complex as a modern OS is a single monolithic[1] problem. > it's complex because it does a complex work. See, you agree that it's a complex problem! It's so complex with so many different use cases it isn't even p…

A nice talk that might change your view of the subject is the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AeWu1fZ7bY .

It's a video from BSDCan, the Canadian BSD conference. Even some BSD people are realizing that systemd has a good point to exist!

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#188

Post by hnarn »

edoceo wrote: post #138
hnarn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but doesn't that also make them slower?

Hardly. I'm an OpenRC user. Booting OpenRC vs SystemD, desktop, server, VM. Near zero difference in boot time, neither side was a clear winner, nor always faster. My favorite part is OpenRC still likes the old ways, has script extensions for new ways, and runs the same path every time.

That's just anecdotal. If it's a technical fact that SystemD does parallel upstarts where OpenRC for example does not, that just means you don't have a system where parallel upstart makes a difference.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#189

Post by Znafon »

doiwin wrote: post #96
Znafon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I want to write a script that runs on startup, I expect that I can just put (or link) it in some directory where the scripts are that get started on startup This is not very specific, have you never had any race-condition with this? There is a reason SystemD ask some informations regarding the service that needs to be launched. I don't see how ignoring those makes a good argument against SystemD.

No, I can not remember having a race condition regarding startup scripts.

I think I had one where one service was trying to bind to a network interface that wasn't ready, maybe docker0. It was painful to find and fix.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#190

Post by Znafon »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #128
izacus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you didn't have to mantain a system of any kind of complexity.

And you have? Can you give an example and how you solved it? Thanks! (edit: not trolling; curious)

I think my issue what binding Consul to docker0 while Docker is starting. Half the time the interface wasn't ready. I don't remember exactly how I fixed it but with SystemD you can just specify a dependency.
Post reply on HN