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Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

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Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#211

Post by idoubtit »

bandrami wrote: post #164
rcxdude wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always dreaded trying to create a service with bash-based init scripts. Not only did it involve rolling a heck of a lot yourself (the thing you were running was generally expected to do the double-fork hack itself and otherwise do 'well behaved daemon' things), it varied significantly from distro to distro, and I was never confident I actually got it right (and indeed, I often saw cases where it had most definitely…

Is this really that hard to type? https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/etc/rc.d/watchdog...

> Is this really that hard to type?

Your link is irrelevant. It points to OpenBSD which uses rc, not sysv. The 3 lines of this rc startup script use a file of 400 lines of shell with commands that don't exist in SysVinit.

With sysv, the difficulty depended on the local tools because the launching scripts could not be shared across Linux distributions. Debian used the compiled helper `start-stop-daemon` while Redhat did not.

With sysv, some sysadmin tasks require external tools. Try to write a launching script with a smart autorestart in case of crash. Make it work even when the daemon forks. Do not assume that the daemon writes its initial PID anywhere. IIRC, to get this feature, we had to drop sysv for runit, two decades ago. Now it's just 2 lines in a systemd unit.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#213

Post by nine_k »

pjmlp wrote: post #195
nine_k wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A project which is intended to be a learning experience in building a Unix variant (in this case, Linux) is a kinda right place for sticking to the Unix philosophy and design, for illustrative purposes. Mr Pike has indeed constructed a better OS than Unix; too bad AT&T neither knew how to achieve viral popularity, nor why Free Software (as in GPL) is going to dominate the world. By about 1995, it was already too late…

Not as much as people in Linux community think, especially those that never used commercial UNIX offerings. GPL is on its way out, a good example is that all Linux competitors in the embedded space, including Linux Foundation's Zephyr, none of them has adopted GPL. GPL based software is now a minority, almost everything uses licenses that businesses rather reach for.

I suspect that GPL2 was instrumental in guaranteeing that the work sacrificed into the common pot of Linux kernel is not going to be taken by a competitor when it's still unpolished, closed, and used to achieve market domination.

FreeBSD came before Linux (as 386BSD), and is also active used by the industry. How much code did Sony or Raytheon shared back to FreeBSD? (LLVM is not FreeBSD proper.)

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#214

Post by nacozarina »

nice_byte wrote: post #197

I had stopped using linux at the start of the systemd takeover (it was not because of systemd). What I don't understand is how this has happened. I didn't care either way but everybody who did seemed to really fucking hate systemd. Then how come it became the default in so many distributions, with so much opposition from the community?

M$ is pushing hard and not pushing alone

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#215

Post by jeroenhd »

pjmlp wrote: post #182
sxzygz wrote: post #156

Sadly is Linux is no longer what is used to be for my generation that cut their teeth having to patch kernels for basic hardware support. Linux is now effectively systemd/linux, and is attempting to become flatpak/systemd/linux through various corporate sponsored initiatives. The only thing worse, in my eyes, are people who distribute things as docker containers. The Linux distro as such is becoming an anachronism. T…

I would have not bothered with Linux if Windows NT had a proper UNIX subsystem. I needed a way to avoid going to campus and fight for a DG/UX terminal. It had nothing to do with FOSS fighting.

> if Windows NT had a proper UNIX subsystem

They actually did, but they made the mistake of packaging only the bare basics with it, and hiding it away as much as they could: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

The American government added some obscure law that forced POSIX compatibility on operating systems for certain grants, so Microsoft made their business OS POSIX-compliant.

In theory, nothing stopped you from downloading and installing up-to-date versions of common UNIX tools. Had Microsoft had the necessary foresight, they could've killed deverlopers' dependency on tools like Cygwin and Git Bash and Linux entirely for many pieces of software, but they were too busy trying to make Win32 the standard ABI.

Funnily enough, Win32 became the standard for proprietary software on Linux (thanks to Wine+Proton) while many Unix/Linux-based tools became the norm for development, even on Windows (git, Qt). How different things could've been!

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#216

Post by jeroenhd »

bsimpson wrote: post #73
bryanlarsen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd is not a monolith, and distros make different choices on what portions of systemd they which to ship and enable by default. For example, not all distros ship and use systemd-resolved by default, to choose from your list.

systemd-boot competes with grub

Outside of Arch(-derived) enthusiast circles, I haven't seen systemd-boot used anywhere.

It has some really nice tools and features that Grub lacks (i.e. it has tooling for checking the state of things like secure boot and analysing the security risks of your boot configuration), but every mainstream Linux OS I've used still relies on tools like Grub to boot.

I have some gripes with systemd-boot's limitations (notably, the insistence on an unthemed, white-on-black menu system that's not exactly enticing to Linux newcomers) but it's hard to deny its merits. Grub is tied together with a spider web of scripts calling each other, loading modules, generating code that is then executed again, and one mistake in one script can cause the bootloader config four scripts down the line to fail, leaving the system unbootable; the concise configuration file for systemd-boot makes for a much better bootloader configuration system in my opinion.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#217

Post by ptx »

rcxdude wrote: post #55
byte_0 wrote: post #50

From a completely technical standpoint, is systemd really better than SysVInit? I ask this question in good faith. I have used both and had no problems with either, although for personal preference, I am more traditional and favor SysVInit.

I always dreaded trying to create a service with bash-based init scripts. Not only did it involve rolling a heck of a lot yourself (the thing you were running was generally expected to do the double-fork hack itself and otherwise do 'well behaved daemon' things), it varied significantly from distro to distro, and I was never confident I actually got it right (and indeed, I often saw cases where it had most definitely…

> the thing you were running was generally expected to do the double-fork hack itself and otherwise do 'well behaved daemon' things

FreeBSD has a general utility that does this for you, daemon(8): https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=daemon&sektion=8

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#218

Post by pjmlp »

jeroenhd wrote: post #215
pjmlp wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have not bothered with Linux if Windows NT had a proper UNIX subsystem. I needed a way to avoid going to campus and fight for a DG/UX terminal. It had nothing to do with FOSS fighting.

> if Windows NT had a proper UNIX subsystem They actually did, but they made the mistake of packaging only the bare basics with it, and hiding it away as much as they could: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX The American government added some obscure law that forced POSIX compatibility on operating systems for certain grants, so Microsoft made their business OS POSIX-compliant. In theory, nothin…

Not really, Windows Services for UNIX was released in 1999, I am talking about Windows NT 3.51, released in 1995, which only supported POSIX.1, badly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

When Windows Services for UNIX came to be, it was already too late to matter, it wasn't really from Microsoft, and came with its own set of problems.

I am speaking from when Linux was still in baby steps, and basic stuff like ELF had just been added with the kernel version 1.0.9, in 1995.

Things could be even more different, had Microsoft kept Xenix, which was my introduction to UNIX, and one of Bill Gates darlings, actually.

https://www.theregister.com/2002/03/20/bills_vision_for_the_...

"The Future of Xenix"

https://archive.org/details/Unix_World_Vol02_10.pdf/page/n21...

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#219

Post by jeroenhd »

cf100clunk wrote: post #2

This is a mindblower. To quote Bruce Dubbs: ''As a personal note, I do not like this decision. To me LFS is about learning how a system works. Understanding the boot process is a big part of that. systemd is about 1678 "C" files plus many data files. System V is "22" C files plus about 50 short bash scripts and data files. Yes, systemd provides a lot of capabilities, but we will be losing some things I consider impor…

I don't mind the inevitable death of System V. It's an archaic relic of the Linux era.

Going systemd-only is not necessarily a good choice (though I do understand it from a practical point of view). There are other, better alternatives for System V that are smaller and more modular so you still get the Unix "feel" without the absurd complexity of interlinked shell scripts that System V relies on.

I'd like to see OpenRC getting adopted in System V's place. Upstart seems to be dead (outside of ChromeOS) but it would also have sufficed. Alas, I'm not someone with the time or knowledge to maintain these tools for LFS, and unless someone else steps up to do all the hard work, we'll probably see LFS go systemd-only.

That said, there's no reason to go full-fat systemd, of course.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#220

Post by pjmlp »

nine_k wrote: post #213
pjmlp wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as much as people in Linux community think, especially those that never used commercial UNIX offerings. GPL is on its way out, a good example is that all Linux competitors in the embedded space, including Linux Foundation's Zephyr, none of them has adopted GPL. GPL based software is now a minority, almost everything uses licenses that businesses rather reach for.

I suspect that GPL2 was instrumental in guaranteeing that the work sacrificed into the common pot of Linux kernel is not going to be taken by a competitor when it's still unpolished, closed, and used to achieve market domination. FreeBSD came before Linux (as 386BSD), and is also active used by the industry. How much code did Sony or Raytheon shared back to FreeBSD? (LLVM is not FreeBSD proper.)

See Android for how much that is working in practice, outside the kernel.

Or the Linux distros used by NVidia.

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