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Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

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Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#91

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

freedomben wrote: post #8
spicyusername wrote: post #3

I remember when I first upgraded a system to a version using it. This was probably a RHEL 6 -> 7 update back in 2014 or so. It made so many common things I had to do so as a sysadmin super straightforward.

Same, that was my first experience as well. It was a breath of fresh air in many ways, and after my initial learning of the new syntax, I quickly became a convert. That said, I have had some concerns over the years about the growing scope of systemd. I think history has shown my concerns were overblown, though I think it is definitely possible and even likely that people were affected by those arguments and maybe mod…

I think the biggest problem with systemd is that they named the main init service manager systemd and also named the organization systemd! It'd be like if GNU named their initrd "GNU". Their other tools just have systemd prepended, e.g. systemd-journald, much like GNU Make or GNU libc (glibc) or similar. The "scope creep" issue doesn't get complained about for GNU because it's clear they're an organization making a bunch of tools for different purposes. Systemd-the-organization is the same, but the naming makes it unclear that many of these tools are not depended on by systemd-the-init-system.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#92

Post by NewJazz »

akdev1l wrote: post #53
mrweasel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journald is an odd one. I don't think it being a binary log/database makes sense. If you have a tiny operation, with a single server, then the binary database doesn't really make sense, having plain text is just easier and faster. If you're a bigger operation, you'll have a central logging solution, in which case you need journald to store the longs as plain text as well, before you can do log shipping. The only use…

afaik journald can just forward logs via rsyslog directly to a remote server Why would it need to store plaintext locally?

Some folks like having some local storage to act as a buffer in case the remote syslog server is down. Not sure if journald can do that on its own.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#93

Post by mindslight »

thyristan wrote: post #78
mindslight wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> consistent-net.rules nailed it to a mac address on first boot fails even harder for > put in a live-CD to debug something and your network devices are suddenly weird I don't know that there is really any good answer here. Just methods that break in ways you're used to, and methods that break in ways you aren't. I appreciate the attempt at static naming based on hardware connection, even if the realities of how thes…

The only consistent naming scheme I've ever seen working was Solaris on Sun hardware. But that only worked because they controlled both the hardware and the software side of things. And yes, consistent-net.rules doesn't solve LiveCDs and reinstallations. But as I've said, systemd doesn't solve those either, and in most cases actively makes them worse.

My experience has not been that the systemd device names are "actively worse". The biggest problem I've had is changing around VMs where subtle shifts in PCIe IDs (specifically subdevices) end up changing changing names. Meanwhile, consistent-net.rules seems like a hack, always in the back of your mind as an arbitrary stateful part of the system. Why should I think of my primary network device as eth2 if there is no reason for it to be eth2 other than merely being the order on the first install?

But if you prefer consistent-net.rules, then more power to you. I'm guessing most of your frustrations could have been addressed by systemd having some shame about changing functionality out from under users, and providing an up-front option to switch between the different methods.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#94

Post by jauntywundrkind »

vinceguidry wrote: post #90
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't match my experience at all. For the life of me, I cannot imagine what you are talking about, what any of your issues are. Did you file any tickets, or report any issues? What about "actually doing stuff with systems" was "nope nope nope nope"? What situations did systemd break in? What did you try before giving up to reinstall the OS? Thise fud train is cast aspersions, no meat.

You probably use a desktop environment like GNOME or KDE. Maybe do some light coding in an IDE. I do not. I run window manager only, i3, with a really stripped down toolset. I like the idea of knowing my system in and out. My current project is writing my own shell. It can switch between command mode and ruby REPL with ctrl-z. You mention filing tickets / reporting issues, sorry, that means contributing to a project.…

Bro, I've been running wmii since before i3 forked off from it. Don't come at me with this dripping disdainful attitude, pretending like you are some high and mighty elite system whisperer.

It's so unfortunate that there is such a widespread persistence of hater-dom. It's so toxic and awful, and so rarely does it have even the faintest shred of anything to stand up on. I struggle so much to see these attractors into the negative as so compelling, so ensnaring of the human souls as they have been lately.

Systemd is amazing, provides such a rich world versus piecemeal poorly managed systems of yore. Yes you could understand init scripts with very little effort but what a sad virtue, to dare to go no further than what an afternoon of exploration might get you.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#95

Post by up2isomorphism »

jhickok wrote: post #7
freedomben wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole post does have a somewhat hyperbolic tone to it. Personally, I agree with the content and analysis, but I could see the language could feel a bit off-putting, especially given the past flame wars over systemd

It's a lighthearted post, so probably not worth tone policing.

It has nothing to do with the tone, it is just a fact. So there is nothing to police about.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#96

Post by vinceguidry »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #94
vinceguidry wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably use a desktop environment like GNOME or KDE. Maybe do some light coding in an IDE. I do not. I run window manager only, i3, with a really stripped down toolset. I like the idea of knowing my system in and out. My current project is writing my own shell. It can switch between command mode and ruby REPL with ctrl-z. You mention filing tickets / reporting issues, sorry, that means contributing to a project.…

Bro, I've been running wmii since before i3 forked off from it. Don't come at me with this dripping disdainful attitude, pretending like you are some high and mighty elite system whisperer. It's so unfortunate that there is such a widespread persistence of hater-dom. It's so toxic and awful, and so rarely does it have even the faintest shred of anything to stand up on. I struggle so much to see these attractors into…

I don't fucking hate systemd. I'm marginally glad it exists. I just don't want to live under it's despotic regime. You might like it because you think trains running on time is more important than freedom.

You're the one coming at me with fucking attitude, like a 16 year old who just discovered IntelliJ. I have done the exploration, then looked online for why everything is so damn complicated now. It's because systemd colonized the world.

It's not just an init system, it's everything below the userland. And a lot of those components are very poorly designed. And it's this big ball of mush where if you use one component, thy must use them all. It's so bad Arch does not support replacing systemd, like at all. You're totally on your own.

Go ahead, try replacing systemd components in an Arch system. I'll wait. And lose the fucking attitude.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#97

Post by jauntywundrkind »

vinceguidry wrote: post #96
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro, I've been running wmii since before i3 forked off from it. Don't come at me with this dripping disdainful attitude, pretending like you are some high and mighty elite system whisperer. It's so unfortunate that there is such a widespread persistence of hater-dom. It's so toxic and awful, and so rarely does it have even the faintest shred of anything to stand up on. I struggle so much to see these attractors into…

I don't fucking hate systemd. I'm marginally glad it exists. I just don't want to live under it's despotic regime. You might like it because you think trains running on time is more important than freedom. You're the one coming at me with fucking attitude, like a 16 year old who just discovered IntelliJ. I have done the exploration, then looked online for why everything is so damn complicated now. It's because system…

I semi-respectfully disagree that I've given you undue attitude.

One of the things I really enjoyed about the Flix programming language submission today was running across their principles section. Right off the top of the list:

> Simple is not easy

> We believe in Rich Hickey's creed: simple is not easy. We prefer a language that gets things right to one that makes things easy. Such a language might take longer to learn in the short run, but its simplicity pays off in the long run.

In my view, yes, there are warts to systemd, but it is an operable understandable system which has a hard fought simplicity to it. I can go to any systemd computer and get a good idea of what's running, understand how it's wired. I use common practices and configs to change or drop in config.

My feeling is that a lot of people want easy. That systemd doesn't pass the easy test.

The past? The past was enormously complicated. It was complicated because every shop has its own way of configuring things. Every shop has their own tools to assess system state, their own way to configure subsystems like logins, dns, networking, logging, time sync, booting. There were countless countless easy answers, a path littered with the bodies of dead easy answers to this or that concern. And you needed an easy answer for each concern; easy didn't go hard to integrate the different factors.

That past was a horrible mess of easy. Systemd feels complex, but compared to the past, there is a persistent understandable simplicity that is a raw joy to use. Things make sense. When you see one thing, you sort of learn how the next works. The back to the woods rejectionism that springs up today is a bizarre weird thing; folks have not seen how wildly different and bedazzling system management used to be, within and across orgs. You might not appreciate why but there's very very good reasons, and I'm fact, the world is inherently complex, there's aot to do, and systemd has created a wonderful pervasive cross-sectional (via it's many opt-in components) "easy" that harnesses and enables the complexity that is, in a sensible glorious way. ("This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.")

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#98

Post by plqbfbv »

vinceguidry wrote: post #96
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro, I've been running wmii since before i3 forked off from it. Don't come at me with this dripping disdainful attitude, pretending like you are some high and mighty elite system whisperer. It's so unfortunate that there is such a widespread persistence of hater-dom. It's so toxic and awful, and so rarely does it have even the faintest shred of anything to stand up on. I struggle so much to see these attractors into…

I don't fucking hate systemd. I'm marginally glad it exists. I just don't want to live under it's despotic regime. You might like it because you think trains running on time is more important than freedom. You're the one coming at me with fucking attitude, like a 16 year old who just discovered IntelliJ. I have done the exploration, then looked online for why everything is so damn complicated now. It's because system…

> It's not just an init system, it's everything below the userland. And a lot of those components are very poorly designed. And it's this big ball of mush where if you use one component, thy must use them all. It's so bad Arch does not support replacing systemd, like at all. You're totally on your own.

It's true, it's not only an init system anymore, it's also a service manager, a network manager, a DNS cache and resolver, a proper logging system (as in, with metadata, all in one place) and more.

Despite being opposed to it in the beginning, probably because it was immature at the time, I grew to love it even on Gentoo - my desktop and server OS of choice - which gives you OpenRC as a fully supported alternative:

- on my desktop, laptop and work VMs, it just works, with varying adoption of its components and services started, lazily activated if unneeded

- on my server, it simply makes sense for service auto-restart: OpenRC still requires you to manually enable support for service auto-restart ( https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC/supervise-daemon#General... ), a feature that comes built-in in systemd and without extra complexity or components, and with predictable outcomes given the unit file

- almost all modern DEs rely on systemd, because it generally improved their session handling, sandboxing, brought user (rootless) services and other features

And generally, I think the biggest win is creating a system service management platform that can be used by all distros in the same way, without having to know 5+ init systems, having different scripts for the same service for each distro. I can basically work on my own devices, on work devices, on cloud VMs, on IoT devices, and have the same behavior, across different distros and hardware.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#99

Post by Ferret7446 »

ahartmetz wrote: post #72
amoe_ wrote: post #40

I was pro-systemd at the time of the controversial discussions. I still think it's a net positive relative to what was there before. But personally speaking, it's only the core of the software (service management) that improved things for me. The other things (timers, journald) I either ignore or don't like, but perhaps they're useful for distributions.

Yes, systemd's weirdly bundled system services largely suck. The ones that I'm sure about: journald is more annoying to use than syslog (it takes forever - like a minute on a top of the line CPU - to scan two months worth of logs) and resolvd has or used to have basic bugs that other systems don't have.

> The ones that I'm sure about: journald is more annoying to use than syslog (it takes forever - like a minute on a top of the line CPU - to scan two months worth of logs)

That sounds like an unequal comparison. For the same amount of log data and the exact same filter operation, journald should be strictly faster or equal to text logs. Are you sure this isn't because in your journald test you're going through a lot more logs? Because journald makes it easier/feasible to collect more logs.

Re: Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

#100

Post by Ferret7446 »

thyristan wrote: post #44
tylerjl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One convenience of journald is that it exposes a single place to plug in log collection for observability tooling opentelemetry-collector, promtail, and so on have native plugins for it, which makes aggregation easier to setup Most tools have "tail this plaintext file" as well, but if it's all flowing to journald, setting up log collection ends up being that much simpler

That is what syslogd has been doing since forever. Journald actually made this harder due to not supporting the established syslog protocol.

And a lot of software don't use syslog because it's easier to print to stderr/stdout or some random log file. Journald makes it easier to capture everything no matter what the software does, including the established syslog protocol, so I don't even see your point.

If everything on your machine uses syslog, journald is a drop in replacement for the dozen of possible syslogd implementations.

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