Linux distros without systemd
ungleich.ch
ungleich.ch
For example, people are complaining about logind being included, but forget that consolekit was unmaintained before that. Yes, there's parts to systemd that not everyone will use, like container support, but in that case you can pretty safely ignore that use case.
For me, systemd has provided a much more consistent way of managing services. There's a tightly defined service definition format that allows one to comfortably modify any 3rd party service as well, (unlike random, variable-quality shell scripts), relatively small amount of commands to learn that work consistently across services, mounts, timers etc. There's also much better handling of modern hardware, hotplugging & the like.
I can't say I miss sysvinit. Also, stuff like [1] from the anti-systemd camp doesn't inspire confidence.
What was the problem with sysvinit that they tried to fix? I don't see any.
The problems with van Smoorenburg rc are widely acknowledged, however, and motivated the creation of Upstart, finit, init-ng, and many other softwares; indeed, the problems of System 3/5 init/rc, which van Smoorenburg rc began as a clone of, similarly motivated the creation of the SAF in AT&T Unix System 5 release 4, the Solaris SMF, and the AIX SRC. There is a history of superseding them that goes back for decades. It is clearly wrong to claim that they are without problem. They've been recognized as problematic and people have been replacing them since before Linux was invented.
* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/system-5-rc-problems.html
Distros that choose not to employ systemd do not necessarily retain sysvinit.
I guess it's part of the confusion too, most of the systemd work was replacing the "rc bits" (process startup and management) not replacing PID1 itself.
Still, the spats with the Linux kernel team and the rest of the community has earned systemd a reputation I can only say it deserves, even if the initial ire drawn towards it was over the top. Systemd is not a project I have strong confidence in to act in the user’s best interest, based on what I’ve seen with handling security issues.
It is easier to configure and is convenient to have one holistic system in a lot of ways, but...
They pushed for Gnome to have a hard dependency on it so that everyone would be _forced_ to use it instead of just letting it be accepted by merits.
They have a track record of labeling serious bugs as non-issues, ignoring them, or just not filing them as CVEs. Serious issues keep coming up.
I don't think the code is high-quality, but even more than that I have a problem with the people being controlling, dismissive, and deceptive.
We should standardize on the interfaces, avoiding hard dependencies. There is dbus for that.
As dbus user, or application, you just need some client library. As an operating system, you also need a daemon running, which is routing the messages among all the clients.
[1] - https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html
I am personally in the camp that doesn't mind that, Linux users should get the best possible software given their system capabilities, not the lowest common denominator one just for the sake of it. (Free)BSD developers are also not looking to make sure their stuff works with Linux, which I think it's a valid approach.
GNOME itself does exist on the BSDs, by the way knocking down the argument of systemd being a hard dependency of GNOME along the way.
If this claim were true it still is beside the point of my comment, that systemd itself has a "Linux only, and we don't care" approach, and dbus for the moment is not that.
> GNOME itself does exist on the BSDs
Yes the ports tree is a wonderful place for those things to sit for those who are interested and for a larger portion to not bother installing them. I don't know how many patches they applied to get it working or what the cost and effect of those patches may be over time.
This seems like it needs some citation. There certainly have been bugs. I think it's legitimate to talk (with specifics!) about cultural issues with systemd's development and its impact on security. But I don't see that this statement is particularly well supported. In particular I genuinely don't know what you're referring to with respect to ignored/suppressed bugs and CVEs.
I mean, systemd is a lot of code and makes up a big chunk of the system plumbing these days. Obviously it's going to make up a big chunk of the bug budget. People don't get upset about flaws in someone's random cgroup launcher or encrypted block device manager or daemon wrapper not because those projects don't have bugs, but because basically no one uses them. Because basically everyone is using systemd!
(Just in case, this is an security issue because it enables constant dosing, as well as clears the resolver cache making spoofing easier)
(Also... gotta be honest that's sort of a vanity CVE. Note the complete lack of details in the report itself, it never saw an eyeball after it was filed. It's valid enough, but frankly I'm with Poettering on the specifics here: if we filed a CVE for every theoretically-exploitable-but-unexploited-until-fix-released crash bug the system would be beyond useless.)
Poettering is dismissive of nearly every bug. Remember when systemd would default to starting units as root when it couldn't parse the username? We're not talking about some minor piece of software like a sound multiplexing daemon, we're talking about the core userland piece of every Linux install. Bug reports on something that central should be taken seriously and with a minimum of snark.
I'm with Poettering on the specifics here: if we filed a CVE for every theoretically-exploitable-but-unexploited-until-fix-released crash bug the system would be beyond useless.
All the more reason to reduce the attack vectors and ensure that your code is well thought out, and coded defensively. That you have too many security issues to generate CVEs for each and every one is a problem in and of itself. Ten years ago how many people thought that all of these speculative execution side channel attacks were possible or practical?
I have a serious contention with the statement that systemd is the simplest possible solution for this problem. Especially since it involves not only service management, but user logins, a data bus, logging management, file system mounting, initd, and a host of other things.
Are all of those pieces necessary? Arguably yes. But not all in one system(d).
And nohup was always a hack. Now that we actually have a functioning user-level service manager keeping processes alive by throwing them at PID 1 to parent needs to go away. I really hope that systemd eventually uses subreapers to keep all user processes under the session leader.
I feel like it's weird to talk about scope creep when logind is pretty much the first system to define what a session even means on a Linux system.
So why should I currently opt for the worse solution? Is the overall design of it promising?
> Honestly Systemd addresses the complexities of a modern system in the simplest fashion but no simpler, and that is the key.
What complexities does it address? I lost track of everything an init system is apparently responsible for.
> It works well overall and end up being more portable and consistent in the long run.
Since systemd only runs on Linux APIs, I can't figure out what this even means. There are init systems that run perfectly fine in plain POSIX environments. systemd is not one of them.
What I mean is that there are init systems that only require POSIX compliant APIs and as such are portable across systems that implement POSIX, e.g. GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX...
systemd requires (in addition to POSIX) Linux APIs and is therefore not particularly portable by any reasonable definition of the word. You can use it if you are running a Linux kernel, and that's it.
Those are irrelevant as they can't even do basic tasks like shutting down the computer or restarting it. Feel free to find a POSIX API for Linux' reboot syscall.
Some systems also require mounting additional filesystems, again not possible in a world limited to POSIX interfaces.
Sandboxing, SELinux, ...? Not in POSIX.
And so on.
Additionally, this is not likely to stop, since they took an init system that was (mostly) written in a memory-safe language (bash) and rewrote it in a memory-unsafe language (C++), thus enabling a whole class of systemic security issues that will keep popping up in the future over and over again as well. This is one of the design decisions behind systemd that irks me the most.
That said I agree they should have picked Go instead /s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History
> Go was publicly announced in November 2009,[29] and version 1.0 was released in March 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)#Hist...
The brand-new language that Google just announced last year was probably not considered a serious option here.
They could have even take inspiration, imagine: typed, functional, monadic init files - "systemd: avoid success at all costs" :)
Lua would have been a good candidate: memory safe, coroutine to structure the code in a concurrent-ish way if needed, and you have a configuration file parser for free (just use Lua as the configuration language, it was its very first purpose after all).
I wouldn't expect CPU-bound multithreading to be much of a concern in an init/rc system. And resource thriftiness and predictability would likely be a bigger concern.
OCaml concurrency is great, and Lwt [1] would be exactly what systemd need: run daemon and poll the answer concurrently.
Ada, C++ and D would have been another great choices.
From system programming solely: libguestfs, Xen API, liquidsoap, Unison, MirageOS, google drive on fuse, 0install.
Rust might be better now; my primary concern would be community size and whether I was limiting my contributor base, which Go also has as a concern. In both cases though I'd take it over C/C++ being used on such a critical project at this juncture.
In 2010, though... yeah, choices are a lot worse.
I'm not against go, other than gc and some size considerations. Given that a lot of k8s infrastructure for the likes of CoreOS and similar are written in it, it's definitely not a bad option. I think that today, and more so in late summer as async/await syntax settles, that Rust should be a first consideration for any low-level system code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History
> Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009[16] and a nnounced it in 2010.
> The first numbered pre-alpha release of the Rust compiler occurred in January 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)#Hi...
Look, I like Rust and all, but are we really suggesting it for projects that predate public release of rustc?
Many init systems have been created in bash, and I'd hardly call that a low level language.
I don't really have an opinion on what language should have been picked instead, though OCaml may be a good candidate.
EDIT: or maybe as PID 2, per https://github.com/omisego/ewallet/issues/108 , though I'd be interested in the idea of writing an OTP application that can reap zombies and forward signals.
Isn't that basically what SysVinit and a good-sized chunk of the management tooling in Linux is?
To their credit, Bash is a _weird_ language, but it's not going to corrupt memory when it crashes, and its failure modes are pretty well understood by the distro maintainers writing those scripts.
And that reason is that one rarely needs to write a million lines of Bash: http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html
You underestimate my masochism and/or overestimate my sense of restraint ;)
Let's just say the language choice went from bad to equally bad.
it causes the script to terminate with an error if it encounters use of an unset variable
While Bash is memory safe, it is also very error prone to write and the potential of shooting yourself in the foot with it is rather big, especially with bigger scripts and considering these are executed mostly with root privileges, bash is not an ideal choice either.
I'd prefer if systemd was a Rust project for sure, but they went with C, presumably to remain consistent with the kernel, GNOME and most lower-level Linux system software, (also, Rust was pre-1.0 at the time).
The 'Imperialistic Culture' you speak of is one of those made-up things that systemd haters keep repeating, but has no basis in reality.
> They pushed for Gnome to have a hard dependency on it so that everyone would be _forced_ to use it instead of just letting it be accepted by merits.
Again, another fairy tail.
> They have a track record of labeling serious bugs as non-issues, ignoring them, or just not filing them as CVEs. Serious issues keep coming up.
A) This is par for the course in Linux software. See also: Linux kernel. One side you have is a bunch of security bros running around trying to fluff up their resumes and trying to turn themselves into heros. And on the other side you have devs working hard on various features and bugs and being resentful that most of their work goes unnoticed while stuff they already fixed is thrown back in their face.
B) Many of the bugs that make it onto Reddit/Hacker news are going to be ones that are largely changes in configuration defaults or behaviors that break things and are meant to be configured by the operating system designers that use it, not end users.
C) This level of scrutiny never existed before for low-level Linux features. The multitude of redundent and terrible shell scripts that made up the majority of functionality that systemd project seeks to replace was always a swampy mess of broken functionality and bad code. Having each and every major linux distribution rewriting 90% of it from scratch in a completely un-portable and estoric way didn't help matters.
Linux advocates actually went so far as to praising the fact that even though half of the scripts in their OS were completely broken and the OS still worked fine was a testament to it's robustness.
The fact that now, finally, after decades of this crap people can now track bugs related to low-level Linux userland 'plumbing' is actually a good thing.
> It is easier to configure and is convenient to have one holistic system in a lot of ways, but...
On the sysvinit side you had thousands and thousands of lines bunch of procedural code of dubious quality that is endlessly rewritten by hundreds of different teams with vastly differing levels of competency and success using a general purpose language for configuration. It was so unportable that you couldn't even use anything but the most basic and trivial (also broken) init scripts from one distribution to another without herculean levels of effort.
On the other side you have a even driven OS configuration and management engine that allows people to describe the state they want the OS to be in via a domain specific configuration language. It has managed to standardize the low level plumbing for Linux operating systems and allows distributions to share improvements with one another in a way that was previously impossible.
If people want a alternative to gain in popularity they need learn what systemd does and understand why Linux distribution makers switched to it. Then produce something of their own that takes those positive features and improves on it further.
All the hand waiving about 'Imperialism via releasing open source software to the public' is infantile.
The upside of all of this is that it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to make systemd unit files portable then it is to make Linux init shell scripts. There isn't any reason why a more capable init system wouldn't be able to parse existing unit files and know then how to start and manage the services and applications that use them... So the effort to move away from systemd should be significantly less then the effort to move to systemd.
The imperialism part is likely due to score creep into parts they just can't handle well enough. systemd-resolved for example had terrible security and functionality issues still after it was being deployed to many distros. These were simple "point a fuzzer at it and watch it crash" issues which should not be seen in a DNS resolver these days.
Maybe it's not for systemd to decide what I'm meant to do. If changes to behavior that they only meant for operating system maintainers to rely on results in angry end-users, they probably made the wrong assumption.
> On the sysvinit side you had thousands and thousands of lines bunch of procedural code of dubious quality that is endlessly rewritten by hundreds of different teams with vastly differing levels of competency and success using a general purpose language for configuration.
Meanwhile, I have ~400 LOC of init scripts (including service scripts) on my daily driver, an init system with <1% the LOC of systemd, and plain text readable system logs. I agree that hand waving about "imperialism" isn't very constructive, but on the other hand I don't think that misrepresenting the alternatives to systemd and exaggerating their faults is particularly useful either, nor is pretending that sysvinit is the only alternative. A lot of people have thought "sysvinit sucks" and done something about it.
You are repeating the there-is-only-sysvinit-and-systemd fallacy, pointed out years ago by the Uselessd Guy and decried by many others since but (alas!) still going strong today in this very discussion, and ironically you are doing it whilst erroneously ascribing things to systemd that it was intentionally designed not to be. systemd was explicitly designed not to be an event-driven system. The wholly event-driven system was Upstart, and in practice it turned out to be a problem. Lennart Poettering xyrself discussed the problem, as did some of the Debian Technical Committee members during the Debian Hoo-Hah.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20190306213420/https://uselessd....
They're probably just busy.
And calling the "imperialistic" is annoying them, so you've destroyed your political capital with them.
The most recent gripe I have is that systemd people can't even do randomness properly and even use non-cryptographic randomness for DNS transaction IDs (ok probably benign). But just boggles the mind.
It's a monolith of sorts that breaks the loosely coupled toolbox concept of Unix.
It's worth watching Benno Rice (a BSD developer, actually) discuss systemd and some of the misconceptions, some of which you're expressing, therein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo
You really should. journald is not optional.
As just one example, the nspawn owning package requires a libnss package which pulls in systemd-resolve. I believe it also requires dbus.
1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".
2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.
systemd has binary format data all over the place, and it is quite difficult to separate out an individual component and have it work properly on its own. Not to mention trying to replace a subcomponent with something else.
systemd is, in general, a tightly coupled system with lots of interdependencies. It is, in many respects, the antithesis of the UNIX design philosophy.
Hell, even modern Software Engineering practices still talk about decreasing coupling and increasing cohesion.
Also, how do you define doing "one thing" exactly? I can see it for `ls` or `cat`, but for anything more complicated than that...not so sure. Is Vi following the UNIX philosophy? If you say; yes, it's 'just an editor', despite 'an editor' being composed of several components, then I can say that systemd is just 'a service manager'. It's a semantics game that does not make sense in today's world.
The Unix philosophy has its uses for sure, but it's far from an universal truth in today's world.
Sure. The UNIX Philosophy applies more to userland, I think, than the kernel.
Edit: I'll add with regard to the kernel, the internal structure of the kernel still has fairly well-defined subsystems that interact in clear, mostly consistent ways. So while from an execution standpoint it is monolithic, the philosophy is still something that is taken to heart to some extent.
> Also, how do you define doing "one thing" exactly? I can see it for `ls` or `cat`, but for anything more complicated than that...not so sure. Is Vi following the UNIX philosophy? If you say; yes, it's 'just an editor', despite 'an editor' being composed of several components, then I can say that systemd is just 'a service manager'. It's a semantics game that does not make sense in today's world.
I think dismissing it as a semantics game is taking it pretty far. It's clearly not a black and white rule, but more a guiding philosophy. When it works, it's beautiful and elegant.
The ability to pipe basic UNIX utilities and programs together is something that has always left me a little awestruck. The flexibility and simplicity there is almost profound. SysVinit was far from perfect, but you could at least trace the execution flow from basically start to finish and, if you understood basic *NIX utilities, have a good idea of exactly what was happening.
> The Unix philosophy has its uses for sure, but it's far from an universal truth in today's world.
Again, it's a philosophy, not a universal truth. A guiding light, if you will.
With systemd, that light is pretty dim, if it's on at all.
Another thing that makes me forgive git more is that its underlying design is rather novel and powerful. There is something to "get" in git (hah!) that justifies the cognitive investment. In the case of systemd the problem of managing services and their dependencies is not novel or really all that interesting. The complexity of the systemd UX is significantly greater than the novelty or sophistication of what it's doing. It's a piece of software built to complexify the simple.
Also looks like there's finally python3 support in the recent mercurial 5.0 release.
No. You still have to launch the Python process per command, which is "extremely" slow (relative to C programs). I air-quote extremely because the difference for a single command is small relative to human time, but it matters for automation that invokes many commands.
This post is from 2018, and maybe Hg's frontend is written in C or Rust now (I don't follow its development). But if it is still a Python-driven runtime, the same basic criticisms apply:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2018-May/153296...
That's not to say git is slow of course. It's just.. basically what you'd expect given it's architecture.
When there is a bug with systemd, you have to fix systemd. And your version of systemd is completely different from the head, because head was rewritten last month (in a process that persists bugs) and yours is a year old. You can't just use head either, because every low level system on your computer is tied to systemd, and they work differently on head. You won't fork it either, because it's so large that a single person can't keep up.
Without a doubt, a declarative init is much better than an imperative one. But that relatively small number of commands is no gain if each command is more complex than the entire set it is replacing, and I'll completely disagree on the handling of modern hardware, hotplugging and the like. Besides, there is the entire logging saga against systemd.
The number of broken init scripts I have encountered throughout the years, that went unfixed for months if not years, stand in stark contrast to this statement. And I’m talking packages like uWSGI on Ubuntu 14.04! This is exactly why I gravitated immediately to systemd. The idea that init scripts actually worked and when they didn’t were easily fixable is not true. Yeah you can fix a broken script locally, but this doesn’t fly at scale n > 1. Submitting patches to distros is not a simple process, and not one that makes sense in this context either. Declarative beats imperative 9/10 times, and systemd is one of those 9.
This is demonstrably untrue. I strongly prefer SysV (which is not to say I think SysV is wonderful or anything) over systemD for a number of architectural and functional reasons.
But I do not enjoy digging into other people's init scripts. Fortunately, I rarely have to do that. I think the last time I had a problem with someone's init script was over 7 years ago.
Out of curiosity, what distros do you use that you've had such a good run with init scripts?
Or they can try out runit, openrc or nosh, if they feel adventurous. The last one is not yet in Debian proper.
To the extent that this isn't flat-out wrong, it's only because SysV init had so few features and so the actual patch had to go to one of many different upstreams. Having had to fix the same classes of problem in hundreds of different places like that has given me an appreciation for how long it's been since I've needed to do anything with systemd other than use it.
One important thing to remember is that the ability to have a standard way to start a process, as a non-privileged user, keep it running, with logging, etc. is something which has been standardized in the Windows world since the early 90s. It's really nice not to keep having to spend time working around the lack of a check-box competition feature for a quarter of a century.
Yes.
Yet systemd is unfixable. The fact that it does too much was the most popular complaint at the time it got pushed into every distro... while I disagree, my main concern is that it's unmaintainable.
In theory. In practice systemd's actually much more transitive since many distros have adopted it and systemd services tend to work cross-distro, so once you learn systemd you can somewhat confidently manage Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Arch, SuSE, Nix etc.
sysvinit shell scripts often differed in subtle ways between distros and the particular distro implementation was rarely transportable without quite a bit of work.
> You can do almost everything with shell scripts.
This cuts both ways. I'd argue the problem with sysvinit was precisely the fact that you can do almost everything with shell scripts, since now you're executing a script as root that can do almost anything, depends heavily on the bash abilities of the author to not introduce subtle bugs, or break easily, (which varied heavily from script to script and distro to distro), and to not be a security nightmare.
I first started using systemd with Arch before it got pulled into Ubuntu. It definitely took a little bit to get used to, but once you understand how to write services instead of cron jobs, it's way more betterer.
I do think that systemd is very useful but have concerns that they simply don't have the man power to maintain that broad feature set and scope they have set themselves.
What previously would be done in multiple different competing projects by different people with different ideas in different companies, is now done in a single code-base. I can imagine that innovation will be hindered that way, because systemd is not Linux. But maybe some day it will be, IDK. Currently it is just to big to scale that well to small systems though.
ConsoleKit was used in many commercial linux distributions and still wasn't maintained, now that its part of systemd and systemd is maintained, does that mean that every component of it is as well?
> For example, people are complaining about logind being included, but forget that consolekit was unmaintained before that.
I use neither logind nor consolekit. These are solutions for problems I don't have. Moreover, they often get in the way: when I ssh into my media PC, I don't want logind/consolekit to tell me I'm not allowed to access the sound or video cards. The only function that machine performs is to do the thing that logind/consolekit are designed to prevent. And it's a required component of systemd.
I'm glad it's easier for you to manage services with systemd. But it's easier for me to manage services with OpenRC, and there's nothing wrong with that. As far as handling modern hardware- huh? I guess it's not clear to me what interactions an init manager is supposed to have with hardware.
Which really speaks to my primary issue with systemd: it's a freaking monster. It does nine million things, but I only need it to do like three things: start services when I tell it to start services, stop them when I tell it to stop them, and restart them if they crash. (if it's configured to do so) That's it. Why do I need or want it to interact with my hardware? Why does it need an integrated web server in order to start apache? Why does it a logging daemon in order to start syslog-ng? Why do I have to use its built in log reader instead of tail, less, grep etc? Where is the boundary between systemd and the rest of my system?
And sysvinit wasn't pretty much a monocultur?. I mean even OpenRC is basically sysvinit with a lipstick.
> These are solutions for problems I don't have.
Good for you. But event handling is something that many systems today do need and I think we should try to optimize for the common use case.
As for you not needing logind/consolekit, sure, if security is not a concern on a system, they're not needed, but again, that's not true for most systems.
GNOME etc. also don't really have a hard dependency on systemd, they depend on logind, which does not necessarily require systemd and indeed GNOME ships on Gentoo, Void etc.
It's also not like the GNOME devs are stupid and got tricked into depending on logind or something. Mo, it solves real problems for them, so they depend on it. Why is this hard to grasp?
* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/debian-systemd-packaging-hoo-hah.html
It's also 3am my time, and I've had quite a bit to drink. If anything in my post comes off as aggressive, please let me know and I'll edit it in the morning.
> And sysvinit wasn't pretty much a monocultur?. I mean even OpenRC is basically sysvinit with a lipstick.
No. OpenRC is very happy sitting on top of busybox init instead of sysvinit.[0] When I encountered problems with my gentoo system built on musl (instead of glibc, #1 source of problems) and busybox (instead of coreutils #2 source of problems, and sysvinit #3 source of problems) they got fixed. A major part of why OpenRC is what it is is to prevent reinventing sysvinit/busybox's wheel.
> event handling is something that many systems today do need and I think we should try to optimize for the common use case.
> As for you not needing logind/consolekit, sure, if security is not a concern on a system, they're not needed, but again, that's not true for most systems.
Security is a concern on all of my systems, however, I do not agree that logind/consolekit add any security (at all) to most systems, or that they add substantial security to a small minority (say 5%) of systems. I would wager that 95+% of all linux systems are one of the following: A) no one is permitted access to any hardware, (video/sound/input) (headless systems, ie server farms, multiuser systems in a university, etc) B) single user account systems, (ie, my laptop. If someone has write access to my .bashrc file, they might as well have root access, and consolekit/logind can't bandaid anything by limiting access to my video device hardware) or C) hpc compute farms. (where the assumption is that all processes have god given write access to the GPUs) In the first class of systems, consolekit/elogind do not add security because all accesses are blocked, (in fact, the existence of consolekit/elogind simply expands the attack surface, making it less secure) in the second class no security is added because the video card is a more difficult attack vector than editing all the common home scripts, in the third class no security is added because whitelist-asterisk-to-video-card is the only sane configuration policy.
logind/consolekit are super awesome for eg educational institutions which have computers with multiple seats. Have four schoolchildren sitting at four monitors and four keyboards attached to one desktop computer? Sweet. (actually most schools use chromebooks now, which last I checked uses OpenRC) It's great that projects like consolekit/elogind exist to support those groups. But pretending like that's a common usecase, or pretending that sysvinint can't support those usecases- stop.
> GNOME etc. also don't really have a hard dependency on systemd, they depend on logind, which does not necessarily require systemd and indeed GNOME ships on Gentoo, Void etc.
This statement is, at best, disingenuous. If you want to install Gnome on Gentoo, you need to do one of two things: install systemd (Gentoo supports systemd as a first.point.five class citizen (my terminology))[1] or install elogind. elogind is a Gentoo specific forked version of systemd with everything that is not logind-related removed.[2] This code is still all upstream systemd code, and there is not a meaningful path towards an independent fork, the way busybox init exists independently of sysvinit, or syslog-ng exists independent of syslogd, or xorg-x11 exists independently of XFree11.
The fact that non-systemd installations of Gnome can possibly exist on Gentoo is a result of Gentoo developers going above and beyond the call of duty, despite barriers placed by the systemd team. And non-linux posix systems, eg FreeBSD - forget it.
> It's also not like the GNOME devs are stupid and got tricked into depending on logind or something.
I have nothing but respect for the Gnome team. I never implied anything of the sort. I am disgusted by your insinuation. Please walk this statement back.
I think that many of the things that the systemd monolith has to offer are valuable. If systemd were a federated constellation of small daemons speaking a reasonably stable API that didn't all have hard dependencies on each other, I would probably be quite happy with it. The problem - again - with systemd is the unforgiving, colossal monolith. I don't have the privilege of dipping my toes into the good parts without having to swallow whole the bad parts. And the bad parts are disgusting. (this is the same problem I have with Microsoft Windows) Modularity is a good thing; systemd is the antithesis of that.
[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC#Replacing_init
That's the thing: there are lots of alternatives besides sysvinit specifically (OpenRC, Upstart, BSD-style RC, launchd, SMF, runit, etc.) on varying scales from "simpler than even sysvinit" to "more feature-rich than systemd". And yet, the best the systemd advocates could ever muster up is/was criticizing specific flaws with just sysvinit.
Of course sysvinit sucks, but you'll notice that (Devuan being the notable exception) most of the article's listed distros use something that's very much not sysvinit.
Based on my experience and all the anti-systemd posts online, I expected to dislike it.
But on it's merits I really like the consistency it brings to the "system layer" of the OS.
I find it's shame when developers skip over systemd for consideration, adding extra layers of complexity when systemd alone would have been sufficient: For example, using Docker when the basic isolation features of systemd would do, or using "forever.js" to manage Node.js processes, when systemd could could be saving 15% memory overhead per process, using software already installed in the base system.
On the other hand, I do support diversity of software and am glad to see some other options still being promoted and used. The dangers and weaknesses of monoculture in the physical world apply to software systems as well.
This is an interesting claim, mind throwing some pointers?
and some other directives documented on the same page.
The timing of these systems releasing does not equate to causation here. Google themselves (creators of cgroups) do not even use systemd on their own hypervisors which leverage cgroups heavily.
> For example, using Docker when the basic isolation features of systemd would do
I quite like systemd-nspawn too, though.
I’m not arguing that this is worth the overhead, or even a useful feature in practice (most companies and products tend to pick one environment and stick to it), but one that comes to mind that systemd would likely never have.
The naming in Windows and Mac, along with the limitations of the Desktop implementation are also frustrating. Don't get me wrong, I really like Docker as an orchestration base, I just don't think the cross-platform support is a value add in practice and in fact detracts as a whole imho.
Basically systemd has nothing like a dockerfile, that's not what it's for.
I think there's a good argument though that Docker should be retargetting its encapsulation work to a lower level OS primitive where possible (which would be systemd on linux) instead of rolling its own.
From my understanding, alternatives _could_ be written, but haven't yet and that means we currently having to ignore more battle-hardened software in favour of whatever is in systemd by default.
Logging is a bit different, but you can tell journald to use syslog.
The success of systemd is in that it solves problems for distros that none other was solving (or even looking other way). If you want to successfully replace it, you have to solve the same problems, and do it better, so it would be worth replacing systemd.
And because none other was doing it, you would have to write solution that does that. Slapping some bash scripts together won't do it.
This is wholly and totally imaginary. Every part of system has an alternative because it is all solving existing problems that people have been solving for decades with a variety of tools.
The only actual challenge is replacing just part of systemd while retailing compatibility with the rest of it.
Alternative doesn't mean 100% substitute both ways. The pre-systemd didn't go in their abstraction in the way, that systemd does - it is basically system-level, event handling machine. The events could be not only boot, but also hotplug, timer, socket connection or others, and their handling is configured by the system or admin in unified way, including unified way of adjusting system-supplied units. Other inits just ran scripts at some order the boot and that's it, ignoring, that something doesn't have to happen at boot, but at some other time.
That's one of the things, that systemd handles way better, than any suggested alternative. By ignoring where systemd is strong, you won't make the alternatives any better.
> The only actual challenge is replacing just part of systemd while retailing compatibility with the rest of it.
No. I don't see why we should have the Sisyphos task of maintaing sysv/cron/etc idiosyncrasies forever. Sometimes, it is better to get rid of the collected warts, and not limit the system to existing semantics.
On the contrary, that's exactly what systemd's predecessor, Upstart, did. systemd, in contrast, did not. Basing the system around the concept of events triggering things turned out to cause problems, as discussed by Lennart Poettering and by Debian Technical Committee members during the Debian Hoo-Hah as their reason for not choosing Upstart.
See http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html, section "On Upstart". It names two big issues with HOW.
I meant, that systemd solves some category of problems, that other tools didn't solve, didn't intend to solve and didn't even care for what the problems are. For distribution maintainers, systemd was something to welcome, that did address their problems.
So yes, there is no replacement (the requirement for it being drop-in only places the bar higher), because there's nothing else that scratches the same itch.
No. One can tell syslogd to read from the journal. There is no mode of operation for journald that does not have the journal, on disc or in a memory filesystem. And journald itself is not optional. The only optional part is choosing to have an extra old-style syslog daemon that is using the journal as input.
They really aren't. It took us a full week of work to get dnsmasq to work in place of systemd-resolved. The problem is that they are tied in to the dhcp client and it only seems to know how to update systemd-resolved's configuration. So getting our custom search path out of dhcp was a huge pain.
I like almost every other part of systemd, but trying to excise systemd-resolved from Ubuntu 18.04 was massively frustrating to the point where I started thinking, "maybe the systemd haters are right…"
Then you should not be wanting to see applications including a hard dependency to systemD.
I never said it is.
What I said is that if someone values diversity of software, then they should object to applications including a hard dependency on systemD. That's just logical, as including hard dependencies on systemD reduces software diversity by requiring that the system it runs on uses systemD rather than allowing them the choice.
The problem is basically that Linux used to be about choice (choose your distro! choose your DE! choose your shell! choose your browser!) but now that it's become big business, large corporations like Red Hat (developer of systemd) have transformed the evolution of Linux from a bottom-up consensus system to a top-down "we develop all the stuff you use and now it all uses our stuff so now you do too" approach. It's _very_ hard for me to build a system without systemd; I can use a niche Linux distro, I can use a BSD, or I can hack another init system (etc.) in myself. None of those are satisfying, I think for obvious reasons.
systemd is not well written, and it is not well designed. Its style and architecture are inconsistent. Parsing is mixed with validation and business logic. The types of CVEs its generated show that there was no coherent thought put into input validation, fuzzing, taint analysis, and so on. The effects of those flaws (your whole system crashes, etc.) show that failure strategies were never considered. And if all that sounds like overkill to you, maybe it is! But I can tell you that these techniques and design strategies are employed by experts to build software that must be robust, like software that controls medical equipment or transportation control systems. We know how to build software that works and that mitigates failures. Looking at systemd's code, it's clear they used none of that knowledge. And that, combined with its sprawling control over my system, makes me not want it on my machines.
I'm not qualified to judge the quality of the code in systemd directly; I've browsed it a little but I am a middling C++ programmer and while it hasn't stood out to me as smelly I would defer to more knowledgeable heads. I get the drive for very rugged underpinnings, and I'm on board with that; in things that aren't C++ I frequently am the one with the scalpels making criticisms similar to yours, so that totally resonates with me. I am not, however, convinced that any of the alternatives that currently exist are materially better, so I kinda shrug a bit? Further, it seems to me that the generally modular nature of systemd (regardless of how coupled one believes those separate modules to be) suggests that a determined programmer could probably build a drop-in replacement--Rust? Where's my Rust Evangelization Strike Force?--that plays nicely with it and grows to replace poor and soft design.
The social aspect you bring up is, to me, the most compelling argument against systemd (because monocultures aren't great in general, etc.--I think most people agree on that). Thing is, though, I think that that bottom-up consensus model was doomed from the start. I don't think it was ever going to be tenable as soon as there's any money in it. Red Hat wants consistency, their stuff is going to have consistency, you can use it or go off-roading.
I don't think there's a great solution aside from "build your own ecosystem and don't let it get capitalism.txt'd to death." Which is a deeply unsatisfying and impractical answer. And to be clear, people who feel strongly about it should do that. I'm not being snarky when I say that. I'm a pragmatist--if it's better, I'll use it, too, and submit patches if needed and when I'm capable. ;)
I do, it's "if you run a big mainstream distro like Fedora or Debian, let your users swap out init systems". I know there have been debates on this, and I know the general consensus is "it's not worth the trouble / it's not as simple as just swapping out something like systemd". My counter arguments are: there are distros that are doing it, so it doesn't seem like it's that bad after all, and when dealing with something as important as PID 1 (or your libc, or your filesystem) we should be conservative and let users swap things back when making a huge change.
The other thing that jumps out at me is just that this hypothetical is mostly kicking the can down the road. If Fedora suddenly decided to support multiple init systems I think it's hard to envision a future where the happy path wouldn't remain systemd; it's what the core folks think is best, otherwise they wouldn't use it now, and even with additional support the lion's share of attention would go to that happy path. To that end I think that any sort of init choice in those distros just becomes "so we'll support it for now, but the set of third party stuff that supports it is going to continue to shrink, so I hope you have an off-ramp in the future."
Between these two issues it seems like separate distros that have a firm commitment to not-systemd end up being necessary anyway and an ecosystem of not-systemd stuff will need to compete for value on those merits. What am I missing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AeWu1fZ7bY
BSDCan 2018—Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd
"systemd is, to put it mildly, controversial. Depending on who you ask it's either a complete violation of the UNIX philosophy, a bloated pile of bugs, a complete violation of the elegant simplicity it replaced or, it most cases, some or all of the above. So why have so many Linux distributions taken to it? Is it as bad as people say?
He's from the BSD world, so his POV is as an (mostly) outsider.
* https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/
I'm not sure the presenter is condescending enough. Maybe he should have given an abbreviated history of Unix as well, oh wait, he did that.
It's like arguing that KDE or Gnome shouldn't exist as options... nobody removed anyone's options. Don't like it, fork it.
Notepad.exe is also an alternative to Word, if the subset of functionality you're looking at is strictly text input.
Systemd was criticizes right from the start for the same things that it is criticized now. No misunderstanding. No bad timing. No tragedy present.
> People don't like change
Wrong! People love change if it is an improvement. People don't like change if things get worse.
> Services, System configuration, daemons, etc are separate distinct things and need distinct C code to be managed
Nope. They are essentially the same thing and should be dealt with by small scripts.
> It does not really violate the Unix philosophy
Nobody really knows what "Unix philosophy" actually is. Therefore it does not matter if it gets "violated". However systemd definitely violates my and many others taste for good software. It is bad taste.
> It's not bloated and monolithic because it's not one binary
The stupidest argument ever. If you have a lot of tightly interdependent binaries that don't make any sense to exist outside of systemd you have a monolithic system were simple nuclear parts are not replaceable with alternatives. Besides from that: Its f*in bloated as hell.
> It's not as buggy as people claim
It is. Besides, the real problem is not the number of bugs, the prolem is getting rid of bugs. Recompiling C code just to get your init working is really a world of nightmares.
> People don't like systemd because they don't like Lennard Poettering
Most only care about technology and systemd is bad technology. Nobody cares about Poettering.
> UNIX is dead
Hearing that coming from a FreeBSD developer? Do his BSD buddy's agree? Why doesn't he switch to Windows? Sounds like conman to me. Remind me to never install FreeBSD. A big part of what made Linux great are the things that were borrowed from Unix and Plan9.
To make it short: The dude loves change and he wants FreeBSD to go in the direction of what Windows is today. I love change and I want Linux to go into the direction of Plan9.
https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/
That said, to me systemd has been a large improvement. Maybe it has its problems, but at least there is consistency in handling services and logs between Linux distributions, which is a big improvement over a bunch of homegrown sysvinit derivatives, Upstart, and homegrown non-sysvinit scripts.
Guix is for you if you want to run old software on a discontinued software stack simultaneously with a modern system.
The big wins for me though are: having all my system configuration in a small set of versionable text files (rather than gigabytes of mutable state), and being able to attach dependencies to the scripts that require them rather than to the system they're expected to be run on.
(I use NixOS, but it's the same concept)
It's not comprehensive - in Guix there are services that exist above and below Shepherd and you can't define ordering dependencies between these (ex: a shepherd service can't depend on a mount (above shepherd), or an inetd service (below shepherd) on a database). I'm not sure that's a huge problem in practice.
Shepherd process stdout/stderr are sent to syslog. Shepherd automatically restarts services if they fail but not forever, and the retry behavior isn't configurable ATM.
The big thing, for me, that systemd brings to the table is consistency. Managing services on CentOS is the same as managing them on Debian which is the same as managing them on OpenSUSE. This makes it a lot easier to deal with the various different Linuxes.
Also, it seems to make writing a service a lot easier. Instead of the service needing to daemonize, write out a PID file, or whatever, it can just be a program that does its thing without forking, sends its output to stdout/stderr and systemd takes care of the details. I tried to go through this exercise on a FreeBSD system and ended up just installing 'pm2' to do it for me. I subsequently figured out what I did wrong, but pm2 is working and I see no need to change it.
Obviously systemd isn't suited for every use-case, but it doesn't seem nearly as bad as some people make it out to be.
It's not really the same, some systemd-based distros diverge a lot and anything non-systemd much more so, including FreeBSD. Even something as basic as network configuration could be completely different on systemd distros, like Ubuntu with its netplan weirdness and Archlinux going into the opposite direction and forcing you to choose how to deal with network yourself from the start.
But still, if you want any sanity in your deployment across different distros - you simply have to avoid using systemd or other host's init and service management systems for anything and bring your own service management with you. It could be as simple as a script starting from root's cron at @reboot (this particular trick survived for decades for example).
This might be true for your in-house app but if you want sanity in packaging your service for inclusion in various distros you include a .service file.
Networking is a little out of scope here - I'd guess that changing basic network configuration is something that's less frequent than the service management tasks.
What I _do not_ like are:
- systemd-resolved
- systemd-networkd
- systemd taking over disk mounts
- systemctl
- unit files spread out all over the place
- mandatory journald
- mandatory dbus
- only works on Linux
- pushing the BSDs farther towards being obsolete
* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/worked-example.html
* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/converting-systemd-uni...
* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/convert-syste...
What group is that?
It's a shame that a lot of core values are lost in favor of these viewpoints.
Then one day several years ago I did an apt-get dist-upgrade and my system didn't boot after that. I have personally hit way more issues with unbootable systems or having to drop into single user mode to fix some BS with systemd. That was enough to make me dislike it, or convert into a hater, and switch most of my personal usage away from Linux.
I think it's gotten better since then. I still dread updating Linux boxes, because I know that some percentage of those updates will have a systemd bug introduced resulting in a non-bootable system or one where I have to manually fix it up.
I remember being absolutely floored when after that relatively complex procedure, not only did the system boot, but it booted faster. I think I became a fan that day.
This happens every time you significantly change something that people use and have existing workflows for, regardless of whether your change is beneficial on the whole.
If you prefer an alternative or forebear to systemd, that is great. Use it. Advocate for the system you prefer. Convince people that the choice you have made is better.
Meanwhile the vast majority of distributions have voluntarily chosen systemd. Perhaps if its critics reflect on the reality of that shift, they could look at ways to improve the alternative to address its perceived deficiencies—just as GCC started doing now that LLVM has taken a bite out of their dominance.
And a [citation needed] that systemd is large enough to warrant being called a monoculture in the first place—and to flip the coin, that GNU init is small enough to not be a monoculture.
Let's not forget a huge [citation needed] that the addition of another alternative into the marketplace of ideas could ever be described as monoculture.
And while we're at it, how about a big juicy [citation needed] that a monoculture is a bad thing anyway, in this instance?
As someone who really wanted the BSDs to get more credit ~20 years back, and spent a fair amount of time on various commercial Unixes as well, I find that phrase rather amusing. Historically poor standardization of the userland aside, GNU/Linux is the poster child for monoculture in Unix, and has left a whole lot of dead or dying software in its wake.
So open source is full of apparent forced goupthink and all or nothing half solutions, at least in the corporate world.
There's home and hobby and personal business systems that are really slick using the lesser known packages and things like "I forked this BSD kernel years ago and twiddled it since". We hear about them sometimes in news stories about "Airport HVAC system found to have been running on C64 for 19 years." Perhaps it inaccurate to say its 'dead or dying' software, until it's no longer appropriate for those use cases where we never even notice its still running.
This is worrisome to me, because, while GNU/Linux is FOSS, "free and open source" doesn't actually mean "unfettered". A small number of large corporations such as IBM and Google have an outsize amount of influence. Doubly so now that IBM owns Red Hat. And, as the whole GNOME/systemd thing demonstrates, even the non-corporate entities have a lot of opportunity and incentive to engage in rent-seeking behavior now that things have been whittled down to such a tight software monoculture. They'd presumably not have even attempted such a thing as taking a hard dependency on systemd if maintaining decent compatibility with FreeBSD (or any other OS) were still a relevant priority.
Systemd and Docker do entrench the monoculture, but they can only have that effect because the monoculture is already so well-established. If this were EEE, they'd be part of the transition to the third E.
It's worth realising that the GNU project could never have happened in the first place - Linux could never have been a thing - if historical Unix had been designed like systemd.
It's all open source.
It's laughable to worry about Gnome taking a hard dependency on an API when hundreds of software programs take a hard dependency on Gnome. Hypocrisy, much?
Meanwhile if the maintainers of GNOME betray your trust, it sounds like you should hate this hypothetical GNOME for the same reasons you apparently hate systemd. Or rather than hating it, you could just fork it. If enough people agree with you, a disentangled fork will inevitably be maintained. Hell, people maintain forks of GNOME for BSD—and that's even more impressive since there is no open source monoculture more monolithic than the Linux kernel API dependency.
You could quite possibly be right that the open source movement couldn't have have started with the design principles of systemd[0] but it's naive to assume that what was good for open source in its infancy is still what's best for open source in its coming maturity.
[0] Given that the open source movement has monumentally benefited from monolithic design principles in the form of the Linux kernel, I think that hypothesis is demonstrably absurd and easily rejected.
And then they move on to the next project and introduce a hard-dependency on systemd there. RedHat has more programmers than me, they're always going to be able to add systemd dependencies faster than I can fork things. The only way users will ever be able to have a choice of init system is if the community can agree that hard-depending on systemd is indeed a betrayal, and publicise this.
> it's naive to assume that what was good for open source in its infancy is still what's best for open source in its coming maturity.
Open source succeeded because it was easy to improve and replace things piecemeal. That's still as important as ever.
> [0] Given that the open source movement has monumentally benefited from monolithic design principles in the form of the Linux kernel, I think that hypothesis is demonstrably absurd and easily rejected.
Linux has suffered from its monolithic approach to kernel-space development, but the damage was mitigated by an extreme commitment to providing a solid API to userspace that never gets broken. So most progress took place in userspace and wasn't affected. There's no analogous boundary for systemd.
Soon to be IBM, darling child of precisely nobody on HN. I think a lot of people are still in denial over this acquisition.
Ask RMS what he thinks about SystemD and I bet you he'll shrug and say it's fine because it's Free, and that's all he really cares about. Needless to say, most people have a greater diversity of concerns.
See, I think that's where you differ from most people. To most people, I believe open source is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. What they want first and foremost is something that works, and it happens to be the case that having the source code freely available facilitates having something that works and gives them a sense of comfort, an assurance, that it will continue to work in the foreseeable future. So appealing to "it's opensource, so you should like it" totally misses the mark. The argument should be "it works, therefore you should like it."
Had SystemD never given anybody any trouble, I don't think it would be hated. I think SystemD is hated because (particularly during early adoption years) there were a lot of things about it that didn't work for a lot of people. This made them angry, because it violated what they actually cared about. Not permissive licensing, but rather having something that works. The principle of open source is not axiomatic to most people; it only has value when it is part of having something that works.
Somewhere else I see this mentality: Android. There are a few among the 'community' who would have me pop open the champagne because "Linux won" on account of Android being an incredible commercial success. But why should I celebrate that? Why is "number of CPUs running Linux" the metric I should be glued to? Because Linux is open source? So what? Honestly, who gives a damn?
(Hopefully that makes my aggressive indifference to Stallman more comprehensible.)
It's Debian violating their social contract that was the problem for me.
What the vast majority of distributions do is irrelevant, a lot of them are chasing popularity or have a proprietary interest in having a "unified platform", but I had come to expect better from Debian. There is really no longer a "reality of that shift" to reflect on, since the SystemD problem has been more or less fixed: there are now debian-based distributions to upgrade to. If other people want to run that dumpsterfire of cowboycode on their computers, that's fine by me.
Which clause of the social contract did Debian violate?
Debian ranked SystemD adoption over their users, since it broke users' computers, even though there were viable alternatives available that would have not broken these systems.
I still like Debian, but I'm not letting them (directly) near my systems again.
The Motte is all the shovelware attached to systemd that is nearly impossible to detatch and the Bailey is the init replacement.
Yes, there are additional, thoroughly optional, components to the systemd ecosystem that you can choose to opt into. And...so?
[Journald]
Storage=None
ForwardToSyslog=True
Humans used to be able to disagree and still get along, but that was boring for drama-preventing reasons.
More on topic, though, I wonder: What exaclty is the relationship between Alpine Linux and ungleich.ch?
That's why we endorse Alpine Linux.
Worse, my most complicated high-uptime machine usually does not shut down in a reasonable time. Systemd says "waiting for session user cracauer" (something like it) for whatever reason. It also hung on undoing swapspace, when that swapspace was a custom stack of block layers. I don't need swapspace to be "shut down". It went into 20 minutes something always stating another timeout when one expired. I mean, WTF?
The problem here is that I had to do an unclean shutdown on that machine (reset button) multiple times, and that I really can't have.
This also illustrates a point I have been making about Linux and the BSDs from day one: When the BSDs boot or shut down the keyboard is connected to the rc scripts. You can do Control-C for SIGINT and Control-\ for SIGQUIT, The latter makes everybody in the stack leave a coredump on disk.
Now, compare these two:
1) in BSD when there is a startup or shutdown item taking too long or hanging I can abort that single item and I can later debug what was going on with the coredumps.
2) on a Linux system with systemd I cannot "cut through" startup or shutdown items I don't want to wait for, and there is no way to debug any of that if the machine doesn't actually come up completely, or if thing happen at shutdown. The only interaction I can conduct is the reset button.
To add insult to injury, systemd also hides a lot of error messages that would traditionally be dumped on the console, and instead of giving me that error message systemd captures it and print on the screen instructions how to get that error message (which usually are longer than the error message was, WTF?). Instructions that I cannot follow because somebody detached my keyboard, and because I will never be in that machine in an up state while that context is available.
This also invalidates the point that systemd could be one platform that you learn once and then use on a wide basis. The debugging abilities are nowhere close to adequate, so you have to learn by try-n-error.
I've been using magic SysRq to force hanging units to quit. SysRq + e sends SIGINT to all processes, and SysRq + i sends SIGKILL.
Obviously what the BSDs are doing, sending SIGQUIT to just the currently blocking-the-shutdown processes, is far superior. Now the coredumps are floating around the filesystem and they'll be there after reboot, and you can see who did what and was hanging in what backtrace.
But the point is, and that's why I think systemd is garbage, that there is nothing there that helps me debug what is going on. If the shutdown is hanging there is nothing to do except the reset button or waiting for an eventual reboot. In neither case will there be any forensics about what exactly systemd had tried to do and how it thought that it failed.
That is the part that is not acceptable.
P.S. I shouldn't have to manually adjust a timeout on disabling swapspace on shutdown to prevent a need for a reboot by reset button. The kind of thinking that got big timeouts into those things is precisely why I say that systemd people just think differently than I do.
That's not really true. Journald is your friend. I find many of the complaints about systemd stem from unfamiliarity with its tools.
The Arch Wiki gives a really nice overview of the most common usage scenarios[1] & [2], that's worth investing some time into. Also [3] is your friend. Just refusing to put any time into learning systemd and then complaining about it, is one approach, but not a particularly productive one.
In your case, I'd try something like `systemd-analyze verify default.target` and go from there.
Additionally, look into /etc/system.d/system.conf, specifically adjusting the Timeout values to a less conservative value.
1 - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd
2 - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Journal#Filteri...
3 - https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-ana...
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo).
I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.
Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly. Even Gentoo struggles with that, as it takes them a long time to release new versions of GNOME because they have to write the patches to strip out systemd first.
LxQt and any KDE-powered distro would beg to differ.
But I agree, in general, that KDE-default distros are few and far between. And the KDE team probably has better things to do with their time than try to maintain a systemd-less fork.
KDE has long been a more crossplatform system than Gnome (much better windows support (and even e.g. solaris), BSD is treated as first-class) so I'd hope they'll continue to avoid being systemd-dependent.
Based on what?
Or because they like systemd and they think the abstractions it provides are useful and its better to not have that code in GNOME. But sure, lets go with the conspiracy angle.
Also, pure serve distros also adopted systemd.
> Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly.
OpenSource project not implementing the features some users want them to implement. Shocking stuff. Its almost as if that's the bases of Open Source. If you don't like the choices of the project you can take the source and do your own thing.
cough cough Slackware cough cough Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu cough cough Tiny Core Linux cough cough the literal dozens if not hundreds of distros that ship with a desktop environment that's not GNOME or MATE or Cinnamon or some other derivation thereof cough cough cough
The reasons for the controversies have not really changed (lennart, the idea that it's not "unixy", a takeover of many subsystems by various systemd components, …) so people who didn't like systemd years ago probably still don't.
As somebody who's not really involved, I found Benno Rice's The Tragedy of Systemd[0] interesting and enlightening.
It’s also to the point where Benno states that people don’t like change, but that’s really not true. Everyone jumped on virtualisation (except Theo De Raat), everyone jumped on containers, Kubernetes, GO, Rust, eBPF et al.
There are new technologies which don’t have to eat the universe to function.
Most people who have a problem with systemd don’t actually hate it, they’re upset because the environment that allowed systemd to grow no longer exists for its replacement. Coupled with the fact that we should really consider systemd a proof-of-concept for something better, means that we’ll be stuck with buggy, weird, non-deterministic C++ for decades.
That’s the root of the problem, not that we nerds dislike change, we tend to love change.
This is your personal opinion being presented as fact. Speaking from some experience in the Mac admin world, I’d really want to see the survey you did to support that claim.
Personally I think it is great. Sysvinit scripts were terrible to write and frequently had bugs because the scripts were usually afterthoughts "Oh yea... I guess we need one of those things". The nice integrations between systemd and journald is well worth it in my mind as well.
There were alternative solutions to that problem that didn't require replacing a long and ever-growing list of system components with tightly-coupled (and often buggy) systemd versions. In fact people who really cared about their init system were already using them.
shakes head slowly
Mewburn rc, which reduced many rc scripts to a couple of shell function calls and a handful of variable declarations, has been used by NetBSD since 2001, and FreeBSD started using it about a year later. OpenBSD, furthermore, reinvented Mewburn rc around 8 years ago. Project Trident (formerly TrueOS formerly PC-BSD) has also since then switched from Mewburn rc to OpenRC.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357589
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11550802
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14736175
/etc/rc.local was first declared obsolete in the BSD world and replaced by a system of drop-in files in a directory back in 1995.
OpenBSD still documents it as an implicitly-recommended way to start programs (though if it's possible to start it via e.g. rc.(local.)conf, then that's obviously preferable).
¿Qué?
I guess we'll have to beg to differ here, but I prefer OpenBSD's (for example) init system over sysvinit or systemd any day. rc.subr is a godsend for eradicating all the boilerplate that "justified" switching to systemd. Enabling/disabling a daemon is as easy as adding a line to /etc/rc.conf.local (or just running "rcctl enable mydaemond", which does that for me). No fiddling with symlinking scripts to runlevel-specific folders (or, in fact, dealing with runlevels at all; if I need single-user mode, that's what bsd.rd is for).
One of these days I'd love to start ripping out the initscripts on my Slackware machines and replace them with something closer to OpenBSD (or hell, I wonder if I can just port OpenBSD's init to Linux?).
Suddenly logins take 30s. Why? Some new systemd problem with reverse DNS.
Suddenly reboots don't happen. Why? Systemd is spinning on a task that didn't used to spin. Yes, probably fixable, but not discovered until trying to reboot.
Can't login at coffee shop WiFi suddenly. Why? Some random systemd DNS issue.
Is my system more secure? Maybe, but possibly because it breaks so often that low uptime keeps it safe!
For my servers, I seriously have to cross my fingers and have the colo phone number handy whenever I reboot, fearful that they won't restart because of some random systemd interaction that happened on some previous upgrade. It's gotten that bad.
"Buggy attack surface" - I am unaware of attacks that target journald; can you point me to a practicable PoC attack?
"Why should I have to" - because other people are building your distros, expending their effort on open source projects, and as part of doing that they made decisions on your behalf. Feel free to not use those distros for ones that make decisions you prefer; the choice is yours.
Weird flex, but okay.
However, as projects adopt systemd-proprietary APIs, distros are forced to choose between maintaining ongoing forks of those projects, dropping those projects, or adopting systemd. E.g. I suspect Slackware only avoided being forced to adopt it because they'd already decided to not support gnome.
Compared to the Linux kernel, systemd's CVE rate is very low.
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/47/Linux-Linux-Kernel.htm...
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/38088/Freedesktop-Systemd...
For a piece of software used by millions of machines, that's a very low CVE count.
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/47/Linux-Linux-Kernel.htm... https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-7971...
So far in 2019, the gap has narrowed: "only" 45 CVEs so far for the Linux kernel, and 7 for systemd.
This contributes to the low rate of CVEs in systemd relative to Linux (for which many less-important bugs get CVEs).
My conclusion is that the systemd project is not its own CNA and therefore not in a position to authoritatively decide which systemd bugs get CVE numbers assigned and which do not.
Now compare systemd CVE's with OpenRC or runit CVE's or any other init system and then you have an argument. But comparing it to the kernel with hundreds of people commiting changes is weak.
This comment is not defending nor attacking systemd.
(Though the implication that systemd is an OS Kernel is ... interesting.)
Prove it. As someone else pointed out, there were 5 CVEs for systemd in 2017 and 7 so far this year most of which are low severity. If you think the mess of shell scripts and programs that systemd replaces had less than that you're simply delusional.
systemd (not SystemD) changes a core part of the OS, we go from a userspace being bootstrapped by a bunch of different shell scripts calling a dozen individual binaries, to an actual system and service manager configured with unit files.
It's a large change, although one other operating systems went through a decade earlier, and some people don't like change.
People really need to stop saying this rather than taking the time to actually understand what people are objecting to.
Moreover, the term "System D" is somewhat synonymous with the term "black market", which Wikipedia defines as a: "series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality or is characterized by some form of noncompliant behavior with an institutional set of rules."
That is a surprisingly good analogy for how systemd acts on a machine, but there is another analogy to a similarly worded term: "Substance D", from the novel "A Scanner Darkly". In the novel, it is described as an addictive psychoactive drug, also known as "Slow Death". Credit for that comparison goes to this foundational criticism of systemd:
Lowercase is a UNIX convention. SystemD does not have a UNIX approach.
Since SystemD is not a Unix service daemon it shouldn't be spelled "systemd" to prevent confusion.
Should I pejoratively call you "CRaIg" because I think you don't match up to my standards of what a Craig, or even a craig, is? Is that okay?
I don't think it's okay. Names have meaning. It is a really minor bit of respect to use them correctly.
There's still a group of Unix users upset about the major init split that happened fourth years ago. Things will never be unified.
While it is optional, ubuntu installations come with it turned on by default.
every few days I discover some new bit of non-determinism:
- systems getting stuck for long periods at startup or reboot with with some useless text like "Waiting for user session to shutdown"
- reboots never completing at all (getting completely wedged shutting down)
- jobs starting in weird orders, like crond starting up before the network, causing various things to break in new novel ways (sometimes, not always)
For example, you mentioned crond startup before the network but that's hardly new with systemd — checking the oldest system I have access to shows that it's configured with two dependencies: “# Required-Start: $local_fs $syslog”. To the extent that systemd changed anything it was exposing that an assumption was wrong — and the nice thing is that you can use a systemd service to replace that cron task with something which _does_ behave the way you thought with precise service dependencies and all of the other benefits to using systemd (e.g. resource management): https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.tim...
as I said, I can fix the issues one by one as I notice them, but if they only occur 1 boot in 10, or maybe 1 in 100 it's miserable and a much less reliable system than before
but hey, the systems now boot 2 seconds faster (if they boot at all...)
the problem is not the issues themselves, as once I know they're there I can trivially google for how to fix them, it's the fact they don't show up except sometimes
I do not care about boot speed at all, I care that I upgrade the system to a new distro release with systemd, test it, then it continues to work that way until I change something else
this is no longer the case, and in 20 odd years of maintaining systems I've never had as much "fun" before as I've had over the last couple of years with systemd
I just want my systems to boot, run my simple applications, then shutdown when I ask them to
Which is what you get out of the box with systemd. The only problems you mentioned either apply equally (e.g. shutdown delays due to blocked processes — having supported NFS clients, let me tell you that was not a new problem in the 90s…) or are due to misunderstandings about how to use other components.
For example, if you have a critical service started in cron with no error handling or recovery, you always had an unstable system and were simply lucky not to have seen it fail before now. Projects like Upstart and systemd were started in large part due to people getting tired of having to kludge around those limitations of the older approaches. Having fixed systems which were configured that way in the past, I much prefer using something which solves it by design than continuing to bet on being lucky.
I have stated three times that I accept that these processes are incorrectly specified, and that my problem is not this -- the problem is that I cannot discover these missing dependencies by any reasonable process
whoever set them up 20 years ago is long gone, and what was reliable is now not
this is a regression
(and let's not get started that my brand new installations of Debian onto a single root partition get stuck booting or reboot 1 in 10 times... I get it, totally my fault as the end-user)
Now. Do you blame the new architecture for this bad situation? Or do you blame the old software, which technically always had bugs but those bugs were previously not triggered?
And a lot of the blame goes to the distro that shipped a bunch of broken binaries.
That is surely an aspect of the language, not the platform?
> And a lot of the blame goes to the distro that shipped a bunch of broken binaries.
Sure, I can see that. It is normally the case with new ports to new platforms to be in a state of unreadiness for quite a while. But this is not really relevant to the question of who to blame for the brokenness; the hardware platform or the software?
My analogy is that systemd merely exposed bugs in other software which had been there for ages (and only sporadically exposed). But then systemd comes along and expose a whole lot of them at once. Keeping with the analogy, some blame certainly goes to any disto which released this combination of systemd plus software which has bugs triggered by systemd, but still, is it reasonable to blame systemd in this case?
Any time you find yourself writing something like that, ask whether you’ve done a good job explaining your point first. In this case, you’ve been vague about everything except that you think systemd is the source of your non-deterministic behavior.
From what little information you’ve provided, it really sounds like the problem is a combination of blaming the init system for things which happen outside of it (i.e. processes hanging) and not learning how to use it. For example, launching a networked process under cron at boot with no retry mechanism has always been a problem because cron never guaranteed networking. Using the init system would have avoided that - even on SysV.
As far as how to discover it goes, fault tolerance has lots of edge cases — e.g. try mounting NFS and firewalling the server, `kill -STOP` a daemon with a clean shutdown process, reboot without a network or DNS (i.e. like you’d have during a facilities outage), etc. — but most of it comes down to learning to work with the way the distribution is intended to be used: use the init system (whatever it is) to launch processes, enable automatic restarts for everything, configure full dependencies on everything you need, etc.
Note that none of that depends on systemd - you can get better results on everything this way, but if you do it you’ll probably gain a better understanding the systemd developers made the choices they did. If you really can’t figure out how to be comfortable with it, switching to a distribution which doesn’t use it will be much better than fighting it and getting angry when the developers don’t support hammering a screw.
Is systemd-nspawn secure enough now we can forget docker et all? I liked the idea of a "chroot" being supported by the service manager.
Notice that the text about slackware sounds a bit "pessimistic", as if it was a somewhat legacy distribution. Nothing further from the truth. We run a small farm of virtual machines with different up-to-date distributions, and slackware is typically the one that follows upstream packages more closely. For example it had gcc 9.1, bash 5, etc. a few days after they were released.
It's non standard behavior changes like this that drive systemd hate.
Alpine really is a beauty.
>checkout why the firefox package is broken
You call that... nice?
https://threatpost.com/alpine-linux-docker-images-unlocked/1...
I challenge you to find any decade+ old OS software community you couldn't make the same comment towards.
Based upon this I found the following quote from the article in regards to Alpine Linux, a distribution based upon BusyBox which implements the functionality of over 100 usually separate executables into one, quite amusing.
> It is small and simple, realising the UNIX spirit to the core: doing one thing and doing it well.
It is a very nice distro although I would not recommend it to beginners since it is a little rough around the edges if you want to do full disk encryption during installation.
Initially I switched to FreeBSD and then OpenBSD but I missed Linux conveniences like native cloud sync clients[1], Steam, Docker, support for the hardware I already had, etc.
[1] this was before I discovered Rclone
But once it runs it runs! The most "stable" rolling release distro I have tried so far. Something that can not be said about Gentoo.
But I don't think we should be angry at systemd developers; they can develop whatever they want. I'm mostly angry at the distributions who opted in to their crap. Systemd has not made my life easier, but it has often made it harder, and the only reason that happened was because a distro allowed it.
Some of the trade-offs it makes, and its expansionist attitudes, are really grating. But it introduced a higher level of consistency in the Linux world for userland developers, which is almost invariably a good thing from a commercial perspective.
Nailed it. The hobbyists are revolting. Anyone interested in making their system do something odd and clever is having problems, and the people running linux systems 9-5 are busy calling us morons for trying or even caring...
The tragedy for me, is that I don't really like how the Init systems work, either. So there's really no one on my side. I seem to always fall into the trap of the Dreaded Centrist.
In my paranoid mind I can see Redhat commercializing it and adding features to it for only paying customers after they win through attrition the monopoly on the OS (after systemd incorporates everything, resolvers, cron, ntp, etc...). They are first and foremost a business with investors and a bottom line.
Again not an attack on system itself, just my untrusting and paranoid nature (to many years of security scans and cve’s and users, can’t trust users)…
Furthermore, if Red Hat can monetize a system manager daemon, well ... I mean, good for them.
Oracle tried with the JVM (they had some commercial features).
Furthermore, if systemd provides a lot of basic facilities (global/user services, device management, login sessions, cron, ntp, DNS resolving) someone ought to maintain and support it, and if a for-profit company does it, I don't mind if they try to cover those expenses. (As long as it's also GPL2.)
Of course someone here at work told me i am splitting hairs and they are pretty much the same thing and compatible.
Seems to me that if you hate systemd, it’s time to try a BSD. GNU/Linux has been going down this path of complexity for years. These same arguments spawned with udev years ago, and Slackware held out then just as it is with systemd. OpenBSD on the other hand embraces simplicity and the old UNIX way. Of course it also lacks niceties like Bluetooth, but that’s the price you pay. Maybe systemd is needed to manage complex systems that support ugly things like Bluetooth.
Basically, where there's controversy (especially with bright minds) then there's always something there.
I hope that future system designers and historians will read and re-read these systemd controversies we are having in the present day... maybe we'll have some fundamental key piece of understanding then that we don't now, and based on it, everyone could agree... of course, then again, perhaps that would never happen...
Still, a lively, highly informative, interesting and thought-provoking discussion! A+ as far as discussions on HN go!
1. Linux system complexity has exploded and needs a top-to-bottom rewrite
2. It's safe to do such a rewrite in C
Since the systemd project, I'd say #1 has been largely affirmed. I like the result of systemd because it provides uniform tooling around complex Linux systems.
I'd also say the tide has shifted against #2 in a big way, there's much greater skepticism that anyone on this planet (short of djb or a few others) can write safe C, let alone safe C with concurrency and side effects.
This is really unfortunate, because it probably means the solution is to rewrite systemd in a memory safe language, and that's a huge undertaking.
At least with Rust, the rewrite could be done piecemeal, since Rust can easily interoperate with C (as long as you don't abuse C macros).
That's the only thing I find scary about such big systems, the lack of comprehensive docs and a "starting point for learning them" from 0 to hero. Like, with Git there's tons of nice tutorials like "learn kit bottom up by reinventing it in way X" etc. plus a good "default book".
What's the equivalent of https://git-scm.com/book for systemd?
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
Also, the "systemd for administrators" series:
Use `man -t systemctl` to produce a pdf version.
There are a couple of files you want to read, e.g. systemd.service, systemd.unit, systemd, deamon etc.
But those are linked at the `SEE ALSO` section.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd
Also, check the related articles on the right sidebar on the top of the article.
It doesn't document everything, but it quickly gets you to learning the overview, the basics, and what's most important for general usage of systemd.
If you really want absolutely everything the references are the man-pages. Excluding those that document C functions, there seems to be 256 systemd man-pages in total. 36 are regular commands (section 1; like systemctl), 64 are file formats (section 5; like systemd.service), 139 are system administration commands (section 8; like daemons like systemd-networkd), and 17 are miscellaneous topics (section 7; like bootup).
I would consider the manpages of section 1 and 5 to be the important ones, and just section 1 is enough if you never intend to read or write a service or other unit file yourself.
Here's an online index of the manpages:
The mechanism was kind of interesting:
SysV init would create socketpair, then fork. The parent (with PID 1, required for correct functionality) would then exec the new SysV init binary with an option specified to make it receive state over the socket. The child would supply that state, then exit.
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemctl.h...
> Reexecute the systemd manager. This will serialize the manager state, reexecute the process and deserialize the state again. This command is of little use except for debugging and package upgrades. Sometimes, it might be helpful as a heavy-weight daemon-reload. While the daemon is being reexecuted, all sockets systemd listening on behalf of user configuration will stay accessible.
I manage 3000 Linux servers and 20,000 services running on those servers. When I log into a machine and am welcomed by a RHEL6 motd I groan, because sysvinit is not enjoyable to use, it takes longer to reboot those machines, and tracking down logs is a chore.
When I log into a RHEL7 machine I am not elated, but I am glad to know that pid 1 isn't trying to make my life harder.
Boot time: A possible 5-10 extra seconds from sysvinit is the problem here not the 5 minutes of BIOS/EFI POST time for those server boxen?
Logs: Where's the storage of the log data in journalctl and what tools can I use to read that data in a small PXE rescue environment? But hot damn I didn't have to ls /var/log so that's nice.
Sarcasm aside how does it make your life any easier? I got a stack of FIXMEs to work on to get our infrastructure working, lot alone stable, on systemd.
> the 5 minutes of BIOS/EFI POST time
Yeah we measure boot up in seconds. If I restart a machine and it takes more than ~10 seconds to boot I send a ticket to our infra guys to figure out why the server is configured poorly/troubleshoot the slow start.
>Logs
I guess I prefer `journalctl -u service.service -f` or `journalctl -p "crit" --since "2 days ago"` to the ole `ls /var/log` and then `grep`ing
Honestly, I don't understand how it makes life harder. To me, systemd is a huge QoL impovement. Even in the most mundane tasks like `systemctl restart tomcat-*`
I use Linux on my desktop. The only non-Linux machines in my house are my work Windows machine and my sister in law's Windows machine. All my personal machines, my wife's laptop, and my kids' desktop are all Linux flavors. Linux is a great desktop imho. That said, Linux is not primarily a desktop machine. It gets some pro-Desktop patches but at the end of the day, Linux is designed for servers and paid for by people interested in its usage as a server.
And it's not just a little different, it's more complex. This increases the number of bugs, the time to test and roll out changes, integration work, etc. So the process is more complex. And the operation is also more complex, meaning more training for anyone who's used to how things worked for 30 years. Doing minor ops work now requires looking at 5 different manuals, requiring extra software, adding configuration management where it wasn't before, changing support instructions, healthchecks/automation tasks, migrations to newer disk images while supporting legacy functionality, etc.
And here's the part that really kills me. Alternatives to all the parts of systemd already existed; if you really needed a better system, you could pick up any similar software and make it work! But then distributions start rolling this out en-masse for all new releases, and we don't have a choice to opt-in. It was a breaking change that did nothing for us that we didn't already do for ourselves, even requiring more work than before.
Do our systems boot faster now? My EC2 instances still seem to take forever to spin up, and physical machines still take ~5 minutes to POST, so I'm going to say no. Can we do new things that we couldn't before? No. Are our systems more stable now? No. Are they less complex? No. So while some people talk up the theoretical benefits, I as an ops person have not seen them. But I still have to look up man pages to remember the three different filesystem trees systemd keeps files in, or the wonky configuration files, or what 5 extra commands I need to get something done.
If you're going to make breaking changes, at least have it make my life easier after I get used to it. Systemd has not done that. And it seems to just keep getting heavier.
I'm new to the game, I only vaguely remember a time when Ubuntu wasn't on systemd. I don't have 30 years of experience with any init system, but I do have 10+ years with systemd. I didn't use another init until I got this job and had to learn sysv. So I'm coming from the exact opposite, it sounds like, place of you. To me, everything you said is 100% true, but about sysv and its line.
I also don't provision too many servers these days because with the exception of a few things that were deemed "to important" all our servers have automated build scripts to go from 0 to prod.
I have the feeling systemd is meant exactly for what you call hobby or novice users. I actually enjoy some of it on my laptop to be honest ;-)
But in the datacenter it has caused me hours and hours of 'fixing problems that did not exist before systemd came along'.
Most of it's 'improvements' target the desktop user. Many of it's 'improvements' actually get in the way in the server room.
I mean, why would I want to optimize my boot time on a server with all this parallel startup crap? The server spends 10 times more time in BIOS and POST then it takes to boot the OS. It has always been like this. And it still is like this.
From a config management point of view I like systemd. I gives me a consistent API to enable/disable start/stop services. That's awesome. I also like that I can 'override/patch' upstream units without having to maintain a fork. Perfect.
But many other things that came from the systemd ecosystem are questionable. E.g. systemd-resolved, timesyncd and that kind of stuff. Maybe these are nice for desktop users who want a click and play experience on their laptop. No problem with that. But why do they have to break my server's for this?
I mean seriously: Linux on the desktop is irrelevant. Why optimize the whole OS/init for a irrelevant use case?
The only time I ever do a "deep dive" and manual setup a server is when I have to provision a server for a new department/service. Generally speaking ansible does the work for me and I just hit go on my console and then go get a coffee. So I don't see much of a headache in server provisioning. I also am on the automation side of Ops so I do a lot more work with a already setup server, and in that case, like you said, systemd API is a godsend.
WSL!
WSL somewhat annoyingly has a custom/proprietary init system. Partially due to it's "interesting" integration with windows, and partially because it's not even really a full linux system yet.
I'm curious if with the switch to WSL2 where they will begin shipping a full linux kernel if systemd will be included or will they stick with their current custom solution?
I think you mean GNU/Windows, or as I've taken to calling it, GNU Plus Windows. (Seriously though, the WSL name is deceptive because it doesn't actually contain any Linux code. There is no Linux in "Windows Subsystem for Linux")
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/
The second real, functional, genuinely working docker support shows up in *BSD and is working - I'll be running it on my desktop.
Personally, while I do think that systemd's scope might have been a bit too ambitious, I do find it easier than something like Upstart
I remember liking how easy it was to set up startup scripts in FreeBSD, so I think I like it? I'll admit I haven't used it as much as systemd or Upstart, so I can't give a strong opinion.
Plus, there’s always the BSDs, which don’t use systemd but still feel very clean and cohesive.
* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/launchd-on-bsd.html
systemd was not a port of anything. And its immediate inspiration was Upstart, the system that Fedora was using at the time, and whose drawbacks provoked Lennart Poettering et al. to start working on systemd.
(Interestingly, Upstart itself was inspired by the drawbacks of porting launchd.)
Its motivation was perhaps upstart's shortcomings, but systemd was definitely inspired by the design of launchd and that was repeatedly and explicitly mentioned in Lennart's very first blog post introducing it:
> But first, let's clear a few things up: is this kind of logic new? No, it certainly is not. The most prominent system that works like this is Apple's launchd system ...
> For socket activation we support full compatibility with the traditional inetd modes, as well as a very simple mode that tries to mimic launchd socket activation and is recommended for new services.
> More importantly however, it is also our plan to experiment with systemd … to make it the ideal session manager… The problem set of a session manager and an init system are very similar… Using the same code for both uses hence suggests itself. Apple recognized that and does just that with launchd. And so should we…
> Writing Daemons:: … The list above is very similar to what Apple recommends for daemons compatible with launchd. It should be easy to extend daemons that already support launchd activation to support systemd activation as well.
> we took a lot of inspiration from Upstart's code-base
... which they actually did and continued to do, from observation. There were significant discussions amongst the systemd people involving the way that things worked with Upstart, including (for just three examples out of the many over the years) having to work like Upstart with respect to putting the X server on the first KVT, Upstart's handling of SIGPWR to process #1, and eliminating /dev/initctl because it was not really utilized in Upstart.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12772915
* https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2016-Ju...
* https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-Se...
In comparison, there was almost zero similar consideration of launchd. The idea that launchd inspired systemd is a myth, not borne out by what M. Poettering explicitly wrote was the inspiration nor borne out by the evidence of what the systemd people did down the years.
Because I've never been forced to use launchd. Well, you could say that I've never been forced to use systemd either but that's kinda how it feels when distros swap it out for you and things start depending on it.
Guess what? I'd be furious if the distros I use forced me onto launchd all of a sudden.
Comprehensive, well organized, reliable, powerful.
It makes a consistent service from what was an evolutionary hotchpotch of stuff.
Whatever it is that the haters hate, I don't get.
I too was furious about the existence of systemd, but now I realize that was mostly because I don't want new things and consider many new things to be bad because they are new and there have been a few 'bad apples' in my personal experience
Definitely. Maybe it's not great that GNOME has a hard dependency on systemd ( I personally don't care), but most people don't appreciate how much things have improved on the desktop with systemd.
Or when I was building VM appliance with dB inside, and I was reading the news about systemd and how it would allow cpu and ram limits per service and thinking how if I had it it would save me from weeks worth of work (yes IBM DB2 is total crap when you run it in VM). and so on.
When I look back of all the stupid things I had to take care of and in systemd are just a config away, I can't help but wonder why people dislike it so much.
In another comment I noted that this is obviously a divide between the hobbyists and the 9-5 linux users. I am both, so this is particularly sucky.