Folks who evangelise these "just as good as systemd" solutions always hide a key factor.
There is a reason systemd took over, its massively supported and widely tested.
There is a reason systemd took over, its massively supported and widely tested.
Edit: I think it serves as both a warning and an inspiration. Don't let a duct tape solution (such as for instance boot via rc shell files) live for too long, or it might be replaced by something baroque.
Having dealt with it for some time now, the amount of "good idea, bad implementation" I hit is too damn high.
And it's nigh impossible to replace for various reasons, including at one point critical interfaces that various user-important programs depended on being a constant treadmill of updates, lack of documentation, and hidden dependencies on internals.
And it has some questionable ideas with good implementations. For example, I hate the journal, but admit it is implemented well.
At the end of the day, it's about tradeoffs and using what suits the system at hand. For some people that will be systemd, and bringing systemd to Adélie and other musl libc distributions means that it can be used by those people.
Call me old-fashioned, but I also hold out hope that at least some of those questionable implementations could be fixed if only someone with the desire would write a patch and send it upstream. Bringing systemd to musl means the people in musl land that aren't knee-jerk anti-systemd maybe might be more enthused to do just that, improving it for everyone using it.
- The utterly broken in places interface (one of the worst offenders is systemctl show non-existing-unit dumping you a screenful of systemd unit parameters instead of "this unit does not exist")
- Bonkers defaults the moment you step outside of the minimum case for new unit - spent ridiculous amount of time dealing with that trying to make a self-restarting service with sane values for restart timer etc.
- Lack of documentation resulting in having to read the source code (which is horrible code, IMO), which I can only figure as being result of built-in assumption that any resource consumed by systemd is exclusively for systemd use. Which causes problems sometimes (my specific case was totally undocumented values used by systemd secrets mechanism wrt to TPM2, which caused hard to diagnose errors)
No one in these comments was "evangelising" and no one was hiding anything. If you want to have a technical discussion about the merits of various init systems you can do it without inflammatory language and without reviving debates that almost everybody is sick of
Thankfully, there are plenty of other non-systemd inits besides OpenRC :)
It's a design difference - systemd assumes services know whether they are intended to run once or restart under various conditions. If you want that behaviour it's just a matter of a tweak to the .service file.
> Also, everything's so opaque that I can't figure out why nftables ruleset isn't loaded on boot
Has it been disabled? ("systemctl enable [service name]" will enable it)
I'm not familiar with runit. Is this approximately equivalent to 'systemctl start service' when service uses the default of Restart=no ?
RemainAfterExit=yes is what achieves the effect (i.e. if the process terminates it is regarded as still active for system-dependency purposes / status unless you purposefully mark it otherwise).
Yes. The people behind it held key positions at Red Hat, freedesktop.org, etc. I'm not calling them some shadowy cabal pulling strings behind the scenes, but it would be silly to discount the political sway the people that started the project have.
Being widely-tested also hasn't keep it from producing system bricking issues, such as this debacle just a few months ago:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/33349 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/33383
Or that time that systemd mounted efivarfs as rw making it possible to brick your motherboard
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Or the time back around 2012ish when an update caused the dhcp lease renewal portion to get wedged and took many thousands of servers offline until the service could be manually restarted or the machine rebooted.
Or there was that time when OpenSSH was compromised because they pulled in systemd components to handle notifications: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4
Then there are all the weird choices that are inconsistent with the rest of the ecosystem, like showing asterisks when typing in passwords instead of nothing: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/8495
Even formerly simple things like log collection for systems not hooked up to Splunk or similar is now a chore. Most distros not longer include rsyslog by default, and pulling log files out of the journal is a painful process. Before, if I wanted to rip out the past week's logs for analysis, it'd usually mean just grabbing some gzip'ed files that were relatively small in size. Journalctl files are significantly larger in size for similar timeframes. OK, so how about I just interact with the journal directly and tell it to dump just the parts I care about? This is quite resource intensive on smaller VMs running in cloud providers and can severely degrade the overall system performance, so now I have to artificially slow things down and get it piecemeal or schedule it to run during off hours when the performance hit won't matter.
I work with systemd daily. It is enough to make me wish I had to work with systemd never. I'm not some sysvinit purist, either - I like SMF on solaris quite a bit!
Partly due to that it's funded and forced upon by corporate. Any product can excel if resources are available.
Also, the purported benefits in this post (which I guess is authoritative for the project?):
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530
Haven’t panned out for me.
8: logind being repeatedly and completely busted (in 2022-2024) got me to try Debian again. 9: Debian taking 10’s of seconds to boot (just like manjaro), when devuan does it faster than a monitor sync got me to switch to devuan.
(And, yes, since logind regularly wedges, I spend lots of time rebooting).
Hotplug worked fine for me way before systemd existed, so that’s not a benefit either.
I used OpenRC because, not knowing about logind.conf, i had no other choice.
So it went heavily imposed almost everywhere even when a quite big chunk of the Linux community deeply disagreed about the imposition.
There is a substantial selection bias in the complaints towards systemd. At the very least it seems that Red Hat's customers didn't have a problem with it. For most Linux users, it was a minor change, but for distro maintainers it was a massive relief[1].
Again, Lennart Poettering actually took the initiative to develop systemd and get it adopted. By comparison, detractors of systemd did not develop a competitive alternative. Thus, it's hardly a surprise that systemd ended up steamrolling the competition. Ultimately systemd is what users deserve because no person or company bothered to make something better.
[1]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530
I don't want to build a competitor to systemd because I fundamentally disagree with the design philosophy that has led to the proliferation of a huge number of systemd-* replacements for other things that already worked fine for all of my use cases. For situations where I have complete control over the infrastructure and don't need to worry about junior engineers that only have experience in the systemd ecosystem, I don't run it, and my life is lower stress because of it. I don't even particularly care much about the init portion of it, though a lot of the improvements are things that I don't really care about, like boot time - if I'm in a situation where a server's boot time has some impact on our overall uptime, etc., then things have gone wrong in a very big way - but if it was just a new init system, I'd have minimal complaints.
But in general, it's one of the reasons that I have been glad to shift my professional focus away from being very specific to the Linux and compute side of things to broader cloud platforms, etc.
I'm leaning that it's against systemd but I'm not completely sure. :)
The reality is that systemd arrived at a time when Linux distributions were dying to move off of sysvinit. Poettering struck when the metal was hot and he delivered a comprehensive tool that greatly reduced the burden on maintainers. Sure, nothing lasts forever, but it will be many years (if not decades) before systemd is slated for replacement.
I mean, let’s assume that Red Hat leadership initiated the systemd project, then we are immediately confronted by a number of problems. First of all, if Red Hat planned to ship systemd with the launch of RHEL 7 in 2014, then why did development on systemd only begin in early 2010? It seems rather irresponsible to intentionally delay development of the new init system for your flagship product, particularly when you’ll be supporting it for the next 15+ years.
Second of all, why would Red Hat hand the systemd project to Lennart Poettering, a developer who was primarily responsible for PulseAudio? Moreover, Poettering was already notorious for being an outspoken member of the Linux community. So why would Red Hat management go so far out of their way to choose such a divisive figure lead their project?
Also, why would Red Hat management seek to imitate launchd of all things? Why not SMF or some other “enterprise” solution instead?
Last of all, upstart development was primarily funded by Canonical and it had proven itself on RHEL 6. Therefore, replacing upstart with systemd meant shifting the maintenance burden back onto Red Hat in one of the very few areas it could actually save on it.
Now, if you still have your doubts than here it is from the man himself: https://web.archive.org/web/20181108025744/https://thenewsta...
Again, what Poettering accomplished with systemd is astounding.
Not really. The community Linuxes which aren't corporate-sponsored (Arch, NixOS) were the first aboard the systemd train.
Systemd really does make a distro maintainer's job a thousand times easier.
I also recently moved to networkd and resolved when setting up some new nixos boxes and greatly preferred the way those worked when doing vlans and split-DNS respectively.