14 ms·

Busybox removes support for systemd

201 points by sethvargo 11y ago

hachre 11y ago
Why?
- whoopdedo 11y ago
  Politics. "But politics shouldn't be a factor in software design. We should cooperate to work with the technologically most useful solution and not let personal or ideological differences get in the way." Bless your heart.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Of course, this makes the assumption that the actors are actually cooperating.
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      cooperation by itself is politics ;)
    - userbinator 11y ago
      That also makes the assumption that there is only one "technologically most useful solution", when in practice every application has its own unique requirements, and trying to satisfy all of them just makes a system which is not particularly good at any one of them (systemd seems to be moving in that direction, not unlike other "enterprise" software.)
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        And that is why Unix as a concept has endured even in the face of opposition like Windows. Because at its heart is a collection of tools that can be combined in whatever permutation that solves the task that the system user/admin has before him.
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    That's one of the critics of open source (BSD) world versus free software world. GNU/Linux projects have been designed for figthing on socio-ethico-political grounds against proprietary software. The first one being Unix. (GNU's Not Unix) On the other hand, BSD prefers to see itself like a community of pragmatism, and creating values in business by sharing externalities (plus a bunch of fanatics that loves nice code like others ferarris). The constant criticism of BSD vs linux is building tools for ideological reasons rarely favours the best solutions because you give yourself an obligation to beat the time to market of "proprietary companies" and to add support for stuff that do not worth being shared.(Word/WYSIWIG editors are a terrible idea in the first place, why spend resources to give them more traction by helping to broaden the user base?) It favours kludges and hacks instead of a consistent simple design. It burns benevolent time, and attention. And BSD have been denouncing GNU/linux projects (Gcc, gnome, systemd, binary blobs in linux kernels) like long term disasters by locking people in technical debts of poor designs. Actually, I am a linux guy with BSD boxes and hadn't I problem with hardware support I would be fully on BSD. I would say they have a point. And just for the record, GNU fundation is not Linus Torvald's best friends. The first time I heard Moglen's talk he was litterally saying that linux was a bad example of a free software project. Yes, freedom of choice is political. But it is not a question of organisation, but individuality. Still some communities aims to gather more zealots than master in their domains. That is the distinction between Free Software and Open Source.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      My interpretation is a tad more charitable. The reason the Linux community is so dysfunctional is because, for most people born during a certain time period, it's the first ever OS they use that isn't Windows, and the first ever Unix. Naturally this creates a lot of sudden revelations, and a lot of blowhards who think they're hot because they can rice their Arch Linux box. In the process a lot of false sense of technical prowess is generated. Moreover, the network effects become so strong that at some point (which has already been crossed) Linux becomes the alternative OS, and from then on people feel like they can just ignore everyone else with impunity. They start to perceive themselves as the leaders, and everyone else must be biting their dust. Notice how Linux users often tend to be ignorant (and not only that, but resentful) of what BSD, Solaris, MINIX, Hurd and other folks are doing. Not the case with users of those other OSes, who as underdogs have more of a reason to cooperate and usually also have to study what the other is doing, especially so that Linux the big dog doesn't poorly reinvent some interface that ends up mutating across FOSS and leaving their access to portable software in the dust. If through some historical accident 386BSD ended up making it unfettered from the trademark lawsuit fallout, it likely would have followed the same course. So would have the Hurd.
- __s 11y ago
  Possibly some backwards incompatible change was introduced & nobody feels like having to maintain version checking down to minor releases. systemd should learn how to run as a non-init service daemon
tym0 11y ago
> systemd people are not willing to play nice with the rest of the world. Can we get a bit a of context on that?
- runarb 11y ago
  There is some controversy about Systemd and Lennart Poettering, one of the main developers. Wikipedia have more info: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History_and_controvers... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversi...
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    What I don't get is, if systemd is so troublesome, why are so many distros picking it up? I know popularity isn't a perfect signal, but in this case of highly technical users that are distributing OSes it seems valid.
    - _cudgel 11y ago
      I'd also like an answer to this question, as well as an answer to the question of what, in exacting detail please, was so wrong with the previous system it needed to be torn out and replaced? I definitely tend toward the curmudgeonly, but to this grumpy old man, it seems like we're replacing things simply for the sake of change.
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        Nah, the old system did need replacing [1], and plenty of them were in fact done. [2] Evidently they went understudied, though. [1] http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/system-5-rc-problems.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/sy... [2] http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/ http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/
        11y ago
slapresta 11y ago
This is going beyond ridiculous.
jkot 11y ago
It sort of makes sense. Systemd has many utilities which can replace stuff from Busybox. And Busybox contains its own init system.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Correct Also, most of systems using busybox shouldn't be running Systemd (or any other 'new' init system to be honest)
  - mangix 11y ago
    uhhhh procd?
  - bbanyc 11y ago
    What about initrd? Most of those use busybox and it's now "recommended" to start systemd there. (Granted, I don't see why anyone would run busybox's syslog - the only component affected by this change - in an initrd.)
    - thwarted 11y ago
      If you want an extremely small system, you can put everything you need into the initrd. It's not strictly an initrd then, since it's not really used for bootstrapping a larger system image.
      - rawdisk 11y ago
        This is the only way I use Linux. I will use the Linux kernel (although it is not my favorite kernel). But I am interested very little in GNU userlands and all the idiosyncracies, complexity and politics that comes with them.
seany 11y ago
Good. Hopefully more distros pick up this stance. systemd is a bad joke.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The technical aspect here is completely insignificant. All they did was remove a basic listener function that was already optional, used to communicate with systemd's socket activator without linking to libsystemd itself. And it seems only one Busybox daemon ever made use of it. The political significance is quite high, and I have to say I feel that this move, though perhaps a bit childish, is a valid signal to express grievances with the absolutist attitudes of the systemd developers. Plus let's be honest here, they aren't the pinnacles of mature behavior either. I think this is the first time a major project has done a statement like this against systemd. I would expect more to follow their example. I of course summarized my issues in "Structural and semantic deficiencies in the systemd architecture for real-world service management" [1] and hope to see systemd go the way of devfsd and HAL. [1] http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/ http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/
- deelowe 11y ago
  This is a lengthy write up that does an excellent job of pointing out technical details regarding my top issue with systemd. That is, it just doesn't make any damn sense. Everything is confusing and buried underneath layer after layer of indirection and dependencies. You can't do anything without touching several files and multiple directories. Try as I might, I can't get on board with systemd. It doesn't in anyway feel like it belongs in a Linux OS.
- JdeBP 11y ago
  > The technical aspect here is completely insignificant. I disagree. My initial reaction was to lament the fact that BusyBox syslogd has lost the ability to be passed its socket as an open file descriptor. One may debate whether systemd's mechanism or UCSPI-UNIX (extended to datagram sockets) is the better way to pass such descriptors along. But it now has no mechanism. BusyBox syslogd is now less than it was.
  - skarnet 11y ago
    Honestly, the people who use Busybox are probably aware of the problems - political as well as technical - with systemd, and most likely not using systemd in the first place because it's not exactly a good choice for embedded systems. Also, for busybox syslogd, it does not matter at all whether you can hold its socket. syslog isn't a reliable mechanism anyway, and busybox is light enough that the non-ready period is really short. So, on the technical side, the impact is quite minimal. On the political side, however, it looks like Denys made a splash, and I'm not going to complain about it. :)
erpellan 11y ago
PID 1 should be boring. Tiny, simple and boring. Any software project that raises this much controversy should be looked at with a raised eyebrow. A software project this large, complex, controversial and coupled that wants to be PID 1? Absolutely no way.
- api 11y ago
  I've come around to being a systemd skeptic too after initially supporting it. It's just so over engineered, confusing, hard to use. Today in the age of user experience anything that wants to replace the (also ugly) old init should be a huge step forward and a breath of fresh air. We're replacing bash nastiness with over engineered "enterprisey" nastiness.
- bossrat 11y ago
  you are exactly on point. the unix way is simplicity and transparency. systemd is complex and opaque. it's ok to have systemd's goals, but an additional goal should be "not a huge monolith"
  - otterley 11y ago
    What is the criteria by which you classify something as "opaque"? The documentation for systemd and its utilities is second to none.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      The documentation for systemd and its utilities is second to none. God help the software industry if that is indeed the case (of course, it is not).
      - witty_username 11y ago
        How so? I was able to easily use systemd and the man pages seem decent. Maybe not the best documentation, but it seems reasonable.
fidget 11y ago
Seems a bit childish
AdmiralACK 11y ago
Good. Systemd can die. Debian should never have started using them, too.
- cosarara97 11y ago
  There is plenty of people happy with debian's adoption of systemd, myself included.
  - AdmiralACK 11y ago
    I'm going to step out on a ledge here, but those that are happy with it really don't understand linux or much of how it works beyond editing a few confs. None of which ever touch systemd
    - tinco 11y ago
      I'm pretty happy with systemd on my macbook (running Arch). Not sure what you're doing on that ledge, but I've been running and managing linux systems for over 10 years (I only use Windows for games, and OSX on the road). systemd's user interface (i.e. writing the confs, controlling the processes) is fine, and that's about all that's important for users. What I don't get is why so many people are in this debate. It hardly matters to anyone what init system (or 'central management and configuration system') is used. It doesn't matter to users, they just want their linux systems to boot, and their confs to be easy to write. It doesn't matter to user space developers, it's just another system to implement support for, conveniently one that's used by most distros and as far as I can tell not terribly hard to grok.
    - witty_username 11y ago
      Well I was using systemd-analyze and systemctl {cat,disable, restart} and it seemed similar to Upstart in Ubuntu if not better. (And I was able to use it intuitively without needing to refer to manpages).
    - XorNot 11y ago
      What understanding do you think they would need to have to find your unhappiness? Because while I'm sure in a competition of esoteric kernel knowledge I would lose to a great many people, I also simply don't care. systemd makes establishing my service start up dependencies amazingly simple. It makes daemon deployment simple. It simplifies a whole host of problems which are not cleanly solvable by other means. It handles process restarts, limits and a whole host of other things for me. No one is bringing a superior solution to the table. Everyone is telling me daemon-tools and init scripts are "fine" (they're not).
woofiefa 11y ago
I really like systemd because all the controversy made me look towards FreeBSD, and this has really been a great experience. No offense, but I can't stop thinking about the Linux community as a screaming child with short attention span. The BSD community seems more like an old grey beard, sitting calmly in the corner solving problems in the best way possible. This may take some time but the result is often superior.
- bsder 11y ago
  As a FreeBSD guy, I'd like to claim smug, grey beard superiority, but there are more than enough counterexamples to poke holes in that attitude. GEOM, cvsup, how many versions of port managers?, perl and gcc extraction/clang migration in base system, and the big ones NetBSD and OpenBSD--all represented wrenching progress--*BSD has its own set of people throwing temper tantrums at various points, as well.
mback00 11y ago
Does anyone here know the real reason for this move (beyond speculation)?
mback00 11y ago
Does anyone in this forum know the reason behind the change (beyond speculation)?
Stratoscope 11y ago
Interesting to see that the commit linked here has been yanked from the repo. For the curious, here is the original commit comment: > remove systemd support > systemd people are not willing to play nice with the rest of the world. > Therefore there is no reason for the rest of the world to cooperate with them. > Signed-off-by: Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux@googlemail.com> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgit.busybox.net%2Fbusybox%2Fcommit%2F%3Fid%3Daccd9eeb719916da974584b33b1aeced5f3bb346&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgit.busybox.net%2Fbusybox%2Fcommit%2F%3Fid%3Daccd9eeb719916da974584b33b1aeced5f3bb346 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
- ymse 11y ago
  Hm? It's still there. http://git.busybox.net/busybox/log/?ofs=49 http://git.busybox.net/busybox/log/?ofs=49
  - Stratoscope 11y ago
    Ah, very good. The page the submission links to did have some kind of error at the time I posted my comment - instead of the commit message and diffs it had a vaguely-404ish error message in red. But it sounds like it was probably just a temporary error - perhaps the HN effect!
- taspeotis 11y ago
  It shows up in http://git.busybox.net/busybox/log/ http://git.busybox.net/busybox/log/
throw23000 11y ago
I have to make this comment with a throwaway as its related to my previous job. Leaving aside the technical issues the launch of systemd 'looks' very much like a playbook PR campaign designed to push through something unpopular. The discrediting debates, labeling near abuse and mockery of opponents, appeals to authority and exaggerated consensus do not look accidental. This has all the markings of a sophisticated campaign. For many this can be off putting but its also a wake up call on some naive ideas about how the world works. Money drives decisions, the cathedral and bazaar as a metaphor has no meaning when the bazaar has spawned a billon dollar cathedral in its midst, and like the failure of communism in practice this too could be anticipated. Money has its own agenda and always corrupts everything. And we all know this because its part of our historical record and common sense. And there is nothing we can do about that because in the real work words are meaningless. Individuals have zero power, groups have some power but its groups with money that hold the cards. The Debian management tells users,not out of exasperation, or frustration but of arrogance that they essentially don't matter, and the only way they can have a voice is with code. This disrespect for users lies in contrast to a project that has none and thus the self awareness to realise it is meaningless without them. This new found arrogance sits uneasily with the ideals of the open source movement but anyone who draws the dots will realise its not an open source movement but a full fledged corporate movement with the thinnest veneer of ideology that is not up for 'management'. For the next generation you cannot protect ideals if you enable and allow cathedrals to grow in your midst. For the current things do not automatically fix themselves, the awareness of the power of money to influence outcomes and how to firewall them, how to ensure co-existence, sustenance and growth, how to reward projects and developers and how to ensure you are not getting hijacked and sidelines by interested parties should be the 'community', and there is no such current organization in the ecosystem that's not tainted by corporatism and opportunism.
- ymse 11y ago
  How is this related to anything, let alone your job? As I'm sure you know, systemd grew out of Red Hat, and Debian as most other Linux distributions have adopted it in lack of a better alternative. There is no grand scheme to it other than getting rid of SysV. In a few years time uselessd, nosh, dmd and the many other systemd-lookalikes in development have matured and there will once again be diversity in init land.
sandGorgon 11y ago
has anyone used Fedora 23 with Gnome, Wayland and Systemd ? I see a lot of religious handwaving around systemd, but F23 shows you the future of Linux desktop.. and it is brilliant. Right from network interfaces that dont change names when you swap hardware (powered by systemd) to making it damn easy to file crash bugs (using coredumpctl) to checking what services have failed "systemctl --failed" to a more secure graphical desktop (rootless gnome with systemd) - it makes for a better linux. Deploying web-services on systemd is so much better - think supervisord, but much more stable and robust. Even docker machines using systemd is great (in fact it is a great way to explore systemd).
- okasaki 11y ago
  I think this is what annoys me most about systemd. All of the advantages you list seem extremely niche to me. I mean network interfaces that don't change names? I think in over 15 years of using Linux I have never had a problem with this, and if I did I'm guessing it would be a) obvious b) trivial to fix. Same with the other stuff. To get these niche features we need to install a very complex, opaque, fragile and verbose set of tools that throw away most of what I've learned in my 15 years. Blah!
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > I think in over 15 years of using Linux I have never had a problem with this, and if I did I'm guessing it would be a) obvious b) trivial to fix. I have run into this. Two wired Ethernet NICs in a system. After a kernel upgrade, the module load order of each NIC got swapped, and the name of each NIC changed. Took me a while to track that one down. :P For 99.9% of desktop users (and -I suspect- many servers), this doesn't ever matter, and the "predictable" names are substantially less predictable and discoverable than 'eth0' or 'wlan0' or whatever. Additionally, if you move a NIC in your system to another expansion slot in the system, its name will change. So, there's that to remember about this particular scheme. NOTE: I'm not trying to claim that it's not helpful! The "predictable network interface" naming scheme solves a real problem. It's just that it -like most things- creates a few unique problems of its own. ;)
- simoncion 11y ago
WizardlySquid 11y ago
Every time you boot up your computer with systemd Lennart Poettering personally comes to your house and fucks your computer while dressed like Stalin.
teddyh 11y ago
This comment thread seems to be the 2-minutes-hate for systemd, with mostly predictable results. But the actual news seems to be that Busybox removed the use of the systemd notify system which lets systemd know that the service has indeed started and it’s OK to start other processes which depend on it. This is no great thing – the normal and traditional Unix way of daemons is for a program to fork, where the fork continues to be the actual daemon, and the original process exits. Systemd can detect this exiting of the started process, and will take that as the signal that the daemon is ready, so there is no need for the notifying function in this case.
- JdeBP 11y ago
  That is wrong in three ways. * That's not what the removed code was doing at all. * That's a 1980s idea of "normal". Forking is something that has been gradually disappearing as standard practice for daemons for the past 16 years, as can be seen from the large number of daemons that now have "don't fork" modes, as compared to the number in the middle 1990s. The idea that daemons fork as some sort of standard practice was the mainstream thinking then, but it is not now. * Most programs in the wild do not correctly speak the forking readiness protocol, in part because those programs are not forking as a readiness protocol in the first place. Many people, in particular those involved in the Debian Technical Committee hoo-hah a while back, considered the opposite of what you claim to be actually true. There is no need for the flawed, bodged, and in practice broken forking readiness protocol when one has a proper readiness notification protocol. http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/unix-daemon-readiness-protocol-problems.html#NooneSpeaksForking http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/un...
  - teddyh 11y ago
    > * That's not what the removed code was doing at all. All right, what was the removed code doing? > * That's a 1980s idea of "normal". That’s why I called it “normal and traditional”. > * Most programs in the wild do not correctly speak the forking readiness protocol True enough. But for practical purposes, it’s mostly good enough. And I’d think that it doesn’t matter that much for people running BusyBox with sysvinit.
Sevrene 11y ago
There's a lot of hate for systemd and there's also a lot of people ignoring valid criticisms and going so far as labeling those making the criticisms as haters. This does not bode well for reasonable discussion. It has become very political. Whether systemd is a good thing or a bad thing depends ultimately on what you're trying to do and what sort of operating system you're using. For some people systemd is really helpful, for others it gets in the way and creates unnecessary complexity where it otherwise wouldn't exist. I've been using systemd along with fleet on coreos, and it's fantastic for me but I personally wouldn't want systemd on my desktop. The problem is that it has been forced onto people left right and centre when it doesn't suit their needs. That essential reasonable debate never occurred and those that are forced to either swap distro or 'convert' to systemd get upset. If there was a reasonable debate people would still hate on systemd, but at least the reasons for using it would be more known and the criticisms atleast acknowledged.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  > There's a lot of hate for systemd and there's also a lot of people ignoring valid criticisms and going so far as labeling those making the criticisms as haters. This does not bode well for reasonable discussion. It has become very political. I can't shake the suspicion that ever since gamergate, or perhaps even "for the lulz" anonymous, there have been people going around the net, latching onto anything vaguely controversial, and trying their best to stir up trouble by making threats and statements that are barely relevant to the topic.
  - Sevrene 11y ago
    I think there has pretty much always been trolls on the internet. Back in the 90s it felt like no one took the happenings on the internet all that seriously, it was a bit of a lark. Now that it's much more mainstream, it's embedded in our everyday lives and companies make a lot of money from it. So it would make sense that everyone takes it a lot more seriously and it's easier to troll people if they take you seriously. Although not all haters are trolls of course, but it's really hard(impossible?) to tell over the internet (Poe's law), especially when you have haters, fanatics and trolls all playing each other and the only person who wins is the troll in that scenario.
pepijndevos 11y ago
Wait, people are using Systemd on embedded Linux? You go out of your way to replace the Linux userland with a single small binary, and possibly go through the trouble of using a small libc implementation, and then you install this mammoth called systemd.
- Matthias247 11y ago
  Embedded is not embedded: Theres the really deeply embedded systems running on tiny processors which probably only run a single binary and are never updated. And then there are big systems (think cellphones, automotive infotainment, etc.) running on quad core procoessors where you have dozens of processes, which might even be independently installed or updated. For those kind of systems you really want a sophisticated init system, and the cost of systemd is probably minimal compared to the instances of chromium/webkit/blink that you might already have on your system.
- JdeBP 11y ago
  Yes, and this has been one of the ways to configure uClibc buildroot for some years, now. * http://superuser.com/a/699401/38062 http://superuser.com/a/699401/38062 * http://buildroot.uclibc.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#_init_system http://buildroot.uclibc.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#_in... One might think that the technical changes here are "completely insignificant", but in fact there has been quite a lot of interaction between systemd and the BusyBox world over the years. With those as context, the headlined patch appears in rather a different perspective. Some examples: * Davide Cavalca's patches from 2011 adding socket inheritance to BusyBox's syslogd, some options to hwclock, and some units: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2011-January/074358.html http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2011-January/0743... * Davide Cavalca's patches from 2012 disabling some log services in favour of the systemd journal: http://openbricks-commits.narkive.com/jCnYGx8H/r13814-busybox-disable-syslogd-and-klogd-obsoleted-by-syste http://openbricks-commits.narkive.com/jCnYGx8H/r13814-busybo... * Peter Korsgaard's patch to avahi for BusyBox-rootfs disabling things that uClibc did not have, from 2010: https://github.com/enclustra-bsp/busybox-rootfs/blob/4e302ac83d89fd370cab96ffa30ad406dd104ec0/package/avahi/avahi-disable-systemd-support.patch https://github.com/enclustra-bsp/busybox-rootfs/blob/4e302ac... * Peter Seiderer's patch adding a PostgreSQL systemd unit to uClibc buildroot in 2014: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2014-May/097163.html http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2014-May/097163... ( approved in 2015: http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/commit/?id=828d7b2f0d22885c70e50b247b79268101c5bed1 http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/commit/?id=828d7b2f0d2288... ) * Albert Antony's BusyBox patch from 2015 to add crond.service: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.embedded.ptxdist.devel/13112 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.embedded.ptxdist.devel... * Denys Vlasenko is the person removing the ability for syslogd to inherit its socket (via a systemd mechanism) in the headlined patch. Here is the very same person adding that same code in the first place, back in 2011: http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=9b3b9790b32d440eb89af5edda70a66b1829e861 http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=9b3b9790b32d440eb8...
sandGorgon 11y ago
Interestingly, Busybox developers seem to have a lot of hate for sysv init. http://busybox.net/~vda/init_vs_runsv.html http://busybox.net/~vda/init_vs_runsv.html "SysV init must die."

201 points by sethvargo 11y ago

hachre 11y ago

Why?

whoopdedo 11y ago
Politics. "But politics shouldn't be a factor in software design. We should cooperate to work with the technologically most useful solution and not let personal or ideological differences get in the way." Bless your heart.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Of course, this makes the assumption that the actors are actually cooperating.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    cooperation by itself is politics ;)
  - userbinator 11y ago
    That also makes the assumption that there is only one "technologically most useful solution", when in practice every application has its own unique requirements, and trying to satisfy all of them just makes a system which is not particularly good at any one of them (systemd seems to be moving in that direction, not unlike other "enterprise" software.)
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      And that is why Unix as a concept has endured even in the face of opposition like Windows. Because at its heart is a collection of tools that can be combined in whatever permutation that solves the task that the system user/admin has before him.
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  That's one of the critics of open source (BSD) world versus free software world. GNU/Linux projects have been designed for figthing on socio-ethico-political grounds against proprietary software. The first one being Unix. (GNU's Not Unix) On the other hand, BSD prefers to see itself like a community of pragmatism, and creating values in business by sharing externalities (plus a bunch of fanatics that loves nice code like others ferarris). The constant criticism of BSD vs linux is building tools for ideological reasons rarely favours the best solutions because you give yourself an obligation to beat the time to market of "proprietary companies" and to add support for stuff that do not worth being shared.(Word/WYSIWIG editors are a terrible idea in the first place, why spend resources to give them more traction by helping to broaden the user base?) It favours kludges and hacks instead of a consistent simple design. It burns benevolent time, and attention. And BSD have been denouncing GNU/linux projects (Gcc, gnome, systemd, binary blobs in linux kernels) like long term disasters by locking people in technical debts of poor designs. Actually, I am a linux guy with BSD boxes and hadn't I problem with hardware support I would be fully on BSD. I would say they have a point. And just for the record, GNU fundation is not Linus Torvald's best friends. The first time I heard Moglen's talk he was litterally saying that linux was a bad example of a free software project. Yes, freedom of choice is political. But it is not a question of organisation, but individuality. Still some communities aims to gather more zealots than master in their domains. That is the distinction between Free Software and Open Source.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    My interpretation is a tad more charitable. The reason the Linux community is so dysfunctional is because, for most people born during a certain time period, it's the first ever OS they use that isn't Windows, and the first ever Unix. Naturally this creates a lot of sudden revelations, and a lot of blowhards who think they're hot because they can rice their Arch Linux box. In the process a lot of false sense of technical prowess is generated. Moreover, the network effects become so strong that at some point (which has already been crossed) Linux becomes the alternative OS, and from then on people feel like they can just ignore everyone else with impunity. They start to perceive themselves as the leaders, and everyone else must be biting their dust. Notice how Linux users often tend to be ignorant (and not only that, but resentful) of what BSD, Solaris, MINIX, Hurd and other folks are doing. Not the case with users of those other OSes, who as underdogs have more of a reason to cooperate and usually also have to study what the other is doing, especially so that Linux the big dog doesn't poorly reinvent some interface that ends up mutating across FOSS and leaving their access to portable software in the dust. If through some historical accident 386BSD ended up making it unfettered from the trademark lawsuit fallout, it likely would have followed the same course. So would have the Hurd.
__s 11y ago
Possibly some backwards incompatible change was introduced & nobody feels like having to maintain version checking down to minor releases. systemd should learn how to run as a non-init service daemon

tym0 11y ago

> systemd people are not willing to play nice with the rest of the world. Can we get a bit a of context on that?

runarb 11y ago
There is some controversy about Systemd and Lennart Poettering, one of the main developers. Wikipedia have more info: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History_and_controvers... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversi...
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  What I don't get is, if systemd is so troublesome, why are so many distros picking it up? I know popularity isn't a perfect signal, but in this case of highly technical users that are distributing OSes it seems valid.
  - _cudgel 11y ago
    I'd also like an answer to this question, as well as an answer to the question of what, in exacting detail please, was so wrong with the previous system it needed to be torn out and replaced? I definitely tend toward the curmudgeonly, but to this grumpy old man, it seems like we're replacing things simply for the sake of change.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Nah, the old system did need replacing [1], and plenty of them were in fact done. [2] Evidently they went understudied, though. [1] http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/system-5-rc-problems.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/sy... [2] http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/ http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/
      - 11y ago

slapresta 11y ago

This is going beyond ridiculous.

jkot 11y ago

It sort of makes sense. Systemd has many utilities which can replace stuff from Busybox. And Busybox contains its own init system.

raverbashing 11y ago
Correct Also, most of systems using busybox shouldn't be running Systemd (or any other 'new' init system to be honest)
- mangix 11y ago
  uhhhh procd?
- bbanyc 11y ago
  What about initrd? Most of those use busybox and it's now "recommended" to start systemd there. (Granted, I don't see why anyone would run busybox's syslog - the only component affected by this change - in an initrd.)
  - thwarted 11y ago
    If you want an extremely small system, you can put everything you need into the initrd. It's not strictly an initrd then, since it's not really used for bootstrapping a larger system image.
    - rawdisk 11y ago
      This is the only way I use Linux. I will use the Linux kernel (although it is not my favorite kernel). But I am interested very little in GNU userlands and all the idiosyncracies, complexity and politics that comes with them.

seany 11y ago

Good. Hopefully more distros pick up this stance. systemd is a bad joke.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

The technical aspect here is completely insignificant. All they did was remove a basic listener function that was already optional, used to communicate with systemd's socket activator without linking to libsystemd itself. And it seems only one Busybox daemon ever made use of it. The political significance is quite high, and I have to say I feel that this move, though perhaps a bit childish, is a valid signal to express grievances with the absolutist attitudes of the systemd developers. Plus let's be honest here, they aren't the pinnacles of mature behavior either. I think this is the first time a major project has done a statement like this against systemd. I would expect more to follow their example. I of course summarized my issues in "Structural and semantic deficiencies in the systemd architecture for real-world service management" [1] and hope to see systemd go the way of devfsd and HAL. [1] http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/ http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/

deelowe 11y ago
This is a lengthy write up that does an excellent job of pointing out technical details regarding my top issue with systemd. That is, it just doesn't make any damn sense. Everything is confusing and buried underneath layer after layer of indirection and dependencies. You can't do anything without touching several files and multiple directories. Try as I might, I can't get on board with systemd. It doesn't in anyway feel like it belongs in a Linux OS.
JdeBP 11y ago
> The technical aspect here is completely insignificant. I disagree. My initial reaction was to lament the fact that BusyBox syslogd has lost the ability to be passed its socket as an open file descriptor. One may debate whether systemd's mechanism or UCSPI-UNIX (extended to datagram sockets) is the better way to pass such descriptors along. But it now has no mechanism. BusyBox syslogd is now less than it was.
- skarnet 11y ago
  Honestly, the people who use Busybox are probably aware of the problems - political as well as technical - with systemd, and most likely not using systemd in the first place because it's not exactly a good choice for embedded systems. Also, for busybox syslogd, it does not matter at all whether you can hold its socket. syslog isn't a reliable mechanism anyway, and busybox is light enough that the non-ready period is really short. So, on the technical side, the impact is quite minimal. On the political side, however, it looks like Denys made a splash, and I'm not going to complain about it. :)

erpellan 11y ago

PID 1 should be boring. Tiny, simple and boring. Any software project that raises this much controversy should be looked at with a raised eyebrow. A software project this large, complex, controversial and coupled that wants to be PID 1? Absolutely no way.

api 11y ago
I've come around to being a systemd skeptic too after initially supporting it. It's just so over engineered, confusing, hard to use. Today in the age of user experience anything that wants to replace the (also ugly) old init should be a huge step forward and a breath of fresh air. We're replacing bash nastiness with over engineered "enterprisey" nastiness.
bossrat 11y ago
you are exactly on point. the unix way is simplicity and transparency. systemd is complex and opaque. it's ok to have systemd's goals, but an additional goal should be "not a huge monolith"
- otterley 11y ago
  What is the criteria by which you classify something as "opaque"? The documentation for systemd and its utilities is second to none.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    The documentation for systemd and its utilities is second to none. God help the software industry if that is indeed the case (of course, it is not).
    - witty_username 11y ago
      How so? I was able to easily use systemd and the man pages seem decent. Maybe not the best documentation, but it seems reasonable.

fidget 11y ago

Seems a bit childish

AdmiralACK 11y ago

Good. Systemd can die. Debian should never have started using them, too.

cosarara97 11y ago
There is plenty of people happy with debian's adoption of systemd, myself included.
- AdmiralACK 11y ago
  I'm going to step out on a ledge here, but those that are happy with it really don't understand linux or much of how it works beyond editing a few confs. None of which ever touch systemd
  - tinco 11y ago
    I'm pretty happy with systemd on my macbook (running Arch). Not sure what you're doing on that ledge, but I've been running and managing linux systems for over 10 years (I only use Windows for games, and OSX on the road). systemd's user interface (i.e. writing the confs, controlling the processes) is fine, and that's about all that's important for users. What I don't get is why so many people are in this debate. It hardly matters to anyone what init system (or 'central management and configuration system') is used. It doesn't matter to users, they just want their linux systems to boot, and their confs to be easy to write. It doesn't matter to user space developers, it's just another system to implement support for, conveniently one that's used by most distros and as far as I can tell not terribly hard to grok.
  - witty_username 11y ago
    Well I was using systemd-analyze and systemctl {cat,disable, restart} and it seemed similar to Upstart in Ubuntu if not better. (And I was able to use it intuitively without needing to refer to manpages).
  - XorNot 11y ago
    What understanding do you think they would need to have to find your unhappiness? Because while I'm sure in a competition of esoteric kernel knowledge I would lose to a great many people, I also simply don't care. systemd makes establishing my service start up dependencies amazingly simple. It makes daemon deployment simple. It simplifies a whole host of problems which are not cleanly solvable by other means. It handles process restarts, limits and a whole host of other things for me. No one is bringing a superior solution to the table. Everyone is telling me daemon-tools and init scripts are "fine" (they're not).

woofiefa 11y ago

I really like systemd because all the controversy made me look towards FreeBSD, and this has really been a great experience. No offense, but I can't stop thinking about the Linux community as a screaming child with short attention span. The BSD community seems more like an old grey beard, sitting calmly in the corner solving problems in the best way possible. This may take some time but the result is often superior.

bsder 11y ago
As a FreeBSD guy, I'd like to claim smug, grey beard superiority, but there are more than enough counterexamples to poke holes in that attitude. GEOM, cvsup, how many versions of port managers?, perl and gcc extraction/clang migration in base system, and the big ones NetBSD and OpenBSD--all represented wrenching progress--*BSD has its own set of people throwing temper tantrums at various points, as well.

mback00 11y ago

Does anyone here know the real reason for this move (beyond speculation)?

mback00 11y ago

Does anyone in this forum know the reason behind the change (beyond speculation)?

Stratoscope 11y ago

Interesting to see that the commit linked here has been yanked from the repo. For the curious, here is the original commit comment: > remove systemd support > systemd people are not willing to play nice with the rest of the world. > Therefore there is no reason for the rest of the world to cooperate with them. > Signed-off-by: Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux@googlemail.com> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgit.busybox.net%2Fbusybox%2Fcommit%2F%3Fid%3Daccd9eeb719916da974584b33b1aeced5f3bb346&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgit.busybox.net%2Fbusybox%2Fcommit%2F%3Fid%3Daccd9eeb719916da974584b33b1aeced5f3bb346 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

ymse 11y ago
Hm? It's still there. http://git.busybox.net/busybox/log/?ofs=49 http://git.busybox.net/busybox/log/?ofs=49
- Stratoscope 11y ago
  Ah, very good. The page the submission links to did have some kind of error at the time I posted my comment - instead of the commit message and diffs it had a vaguely-404ish error message in red. But it sounds like it was probably just a temporary error - perhaps the HN effect!
taspeotis 11y ago
It shows up in http://git.busybox.net/busybox/log/ http://git.busybox.net/busybox/log/

throw23000 11y ago

I have to make this comment with a throwaway as its related to my previous job. Leaving aside the technical issues the launch of systemd 'looks' very much like a playbook PR campaign designed to push through something unpopular. The discrediting debates, labeling near abuse and mockery of opponents, appeals to authority and exaggerated consensus do not look accidental. This has all the markings of a sophisticated campaign. For many this can be off putting but its also a wake up call on some naive ideas about how the world works. Money drives decisions, the cathedral and bazaar as a metaphor has no meaning when the bazaar has spawned a billon dollar cathedral in its midst, and like the failure of communism in practice this too could be anticipated. Money has its own agenda and always corrupts everything. And we all know this because its part of our historical record and common sense. And there is nothing we can do about that because in the real work words are meaningless. Individuals have zero power, groups have some power but its groups with money that hold the cards. The Debian management tells users,not out of exasperation, or frustration but of arrogance that they essentially don't matter, and the only way they can have a voice is with code. This disrespect for users lies in contrast to a project that has none and thus the self awareness to realise it is meaningless without them. This new found arrogance sits uneasily with the ideals of the open source movement but anyone who draws the dots will realise its not an open source movement but a full fledged corporate movement with the thinnest veneer of ideology that is not up for 'management'. For the next generation you cannot protect ideals if you enable and allow cathedrals to grow in your midst. For the current things do not automatically fix themselves, the awareness of the power of money to influence outcomes and how to firewall them, how to ensure co-existence, sustenance and growth, how to reward projects and developers and how to ensure you are not getting hijacked and sidelines by interested parties should be the 'community', and there is no such current organization in the ecosystem that's not tainted by corporatism and opportunism.

ymse 11y ago
How is this related to anything, let alone your job? As I'm sure you know, systemd grew out of Red Hat, and Debian as most other Linux distributions have adopted it in lack of a better alternative. There is no grand scheme to it other than getting rid of SysV. In a few years time uselessd, nosh, dmd and the many other systemd-lookalikes in development have matured and there will once again be diversity in init land.

sandGorgon 11y ago

has anyone used Fedora 23 with Gnome, Wayland and Systemd ? I see a lot of religious handwaving around systemd, but F23 shows you the future of Linux desktop.. and it is brilliant. Right from network interfaces that dont change names when you swap hardware (powered by systemd) to making it damn easy to file crash bugs (using coredumpctl) to checking what services have failed "systemctl --failed" to a more secure graphical desktop (rootless gnome with systemd) - it makes for a better linux. Deploying web-services on systemd is so much better - think supervisord, but much more stable and robust. Even docker machines using systemd is great (in fact it is a great way to explore systemd).

okasaki 11y ago
I think this is what annoys me most about systemd. All of the advantages you list seem extremely niche to me. I mean network interfaces that don't change names? I think in over 15 years of using Linux I have never had a problem with this, and if I did I'm guessing it would be a) obvious b) trivial to fix. Same with the other stuff. To get these niche features we need to install a very complex, opaque, fragile and verbose set of tools that throw away most of what I've learned in my 15 years. Blah!
- simoncion 11y ago
  > I think in over 15 years of using Linux I have never had a problem with this, and if I did I'm guessing it would be a) obvious b) trivial to fix. I have run into this. Two wired Ethernet NICs in a system. After a kernel upgrade, the module load order of each NIC got swapped, and the name of each NIC changed. Took me a while to track that one down. :P For 99.9% of desktop users (and -I suspect- many servers), this doesn't ever matter, and the "predictable" names are substantially less predictable and discoverable than 'eth0' or 'wlan0' or whatever. Additionally, if you move a NIC in your system to another expansion slot in the system, its name will change. So, there's that to remember about this particular scheme. NOTE: I'm not trying to claim that it's not helpful! The "predictable network interface" naming scheme solves a real problem. It's just that it -like most things- creates a few unique problems of its own. ;)
simoncion 11y ago

WizardlySquid 11y ago

Every time you boot up your computer with systemd Lennart Poettering personally comes to your house and fucks your computer while dressed like Stalin.

teddyh 11y ago

This comment thread seems to be the 2-minutes-hate for systemd, with mostly predictable results. But the actual news seems to be that Busybox removed the use of the systemd notify system which lets systemd know that the service has indeed started and it’s OK to start other processes which depend on it. This is no great thing – the normal and traditional Unix way of daemons is for a program to fork, where the fork continues to be the actual daemon, and the original process exits. Systemd can detect this exiting of the started process, and will take that as the signal that the daemon is ready, so there is no need for the notifying function in this case.

JdeBP 11y ago
That is wrong in three ways. * That's not what the removed code was doing at all. * That's a 1980s idea of "normal". Forking is something that has been gradually disappearing as standard practice for daemons for the past 16 years, as can be seen from the large number of daemons that now have "don't fork" modes, as compared to the number in the middle 1990s. The idea that daemons fork as some sort of standard practice was the mainstream thinking then, but it is not now. * Most programs in the wild do not correctly speak the forking readiness protocol, in part because those programs are not forking as a readiness protocol in the first place. Many people, in particular those involved in the Debian Technical Committee hoo-hah a while back, considered the opposite of what you claim to be actually true. There is no need for the flawed, bodged, and in practice broken forking readiness protocol when one has a proper readiness notification protocol. http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/unix-daemon-readiness-protocol-problems.html#NooneSpeaksForking http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/un...
- teddyh 11y ago
  > * That's not what the removed code was doing at all. All right, what was the removed code doing? > * That's a 1980s idea of "normal". That’s why I called it “normal and traditional”. > * Most programs in the wild do not correctly speak the forking readiness protocol True enough. But for practical purposes, it’s mostly good enough. And I’d think that it doesn’t matter that much for people running BusyBox with sysvinit.

Sevrene 11y ago

There's a lot of hate for systemd and there's also a lot of people ignoring valid criticisms and going so far as labeling those making the criticisms as haters. This does not bode well for reasonable discussion. It has become very political. Whether systemd is a good thing or a bad thing depends ultimately on what you're trying to do and what sort of operating system you're using. For some people systemd is really helpful, for others it gets in the way and creates unnecessary complexity where it otherwise wouldn't exist. I've been using systemd along with fleet on coreos, and it's fantastic for me but I personally wouldn't want systemd on my desktop. The problem is that it has been forced onto people left right and centre when it doesn't suit their needs. That essential reasonable debate never occurred and those that are forced to either swap distro or 'convert' to systemd get upset. If there was a reasonable debate people would still hate on systemd, but at least the reasons for using it would be more known and the criticisms atleast acknowledged.

digi_owl 11y ago
> There's a lot of hate for systemd and there's also a lot of people ignoring valid criticisms and going so far as labeling those making the criticisms as haters. This does not bode well for reasonable discussion. It has become very political. I can't shake the suspicion that ever since gamergate, or perhaps even "for the lulz" anonymous, there have been people going around the net, latching onto anything vaguely controversial, and trying their best to stir up trouble by making threats and statements that are barely relevant to the topic.
- Sevrene 11y ago
  I think there has pretty much always been trolls on the internet. Back in the 90s it felt like no one took the happenings on the internet all that seriously, it was a bit of a lark. Now that it's much more mainstream, it's embedded in our everyday lives and companies make a lot of money from it. So it would make sense that everyone takes it a lot more seriously and it's easier to troll people if they take you seriously. Although not all haters are trolls of course, but it's really hard(impossible?) to tell over the internet (Poe's law), especially when you have haters, fanatics and trolls all playing each other and the only person who wins is the troll in that scenario.

pepijndevos 11y ago

Wait, people are using Systemd on embedded Linux? You go out of your way to replace the Linux userland with a single small binary, and possibly go through the trouble of using a small libc implementation, and then you install this mammoth called systemd.

Matthias247 11y ago
Embedded is not embedded: Theres the really deeply embedded systems running on tiny processors which probably only run a single binary and are never updated. And then there are big systems (think cellphones, automotive infotainment, etc.) running on quad core procoessors where you have dozens of processes, which might even be independently installed or updated. For those kind of systems you really want a sophisticated init system, and the cost of systemd is probably minimal compared to the instances of chromium/webkit/blink that you might already have on your system.
JdeBP 11y ago
Yes, and this has been one of the ways to configure uClibc buildroot for some years, now. * http://superuser.com/a/699401/38062 http://superuser.com/a/699401/38062 * http://buildroot.uclibc.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#_init_system http://buildroot.uclibc.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#_in... One might think that the technical changes here are "completely insignificant", but in fact there has been quite a lot of interaction between systemd and the BusyBox world over the years. With those as context, the headlined patch appears in rather a different perspective. Some examples: * Davide Cavalca's patches from 2011 adding socket inheritance to BusyBox's syslogd, some options to hwclock, and some units: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2011-January/074358.html http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2011-January/0743... * Davide Cavalca's patches from 2012 disabling some log services in favour of the systemd journal: http://openbricks-commits.narkive.com/jCnYGx8H/r13814-busybox-disable-syslogd-and-klogd-obsoleted-by-syste http://openbricks-commits.narkive.com/jCnYGx8H/r13814-busybo... * Peter Korsgaard's patch to avahi for BusyBox-rootfs disabling things that uClibc did not have, from 2010: https://github.com/enclustra-bsp/busybox-rootfs/blob/4e302ac83d89fd370cab96ffa30ad406dd104ec0/package/avahi/avahi-disable-systemd-support.patch https://github.com/enclustra-bsp/busybox-rootfs/blob/4e302ac... * Peter Seiderer's patch adding a PostgreSQL systemd unit to uClibc buildroot in 2014: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2014-May/097163.html http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2014-May/097163... ( approved in 2015: http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/commit/?id=828d7b2f0d22885c70e50b247b79268101c5bed1 http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/commit/?id=828d7b2f0d2288... ) * Albert Antony's BusyBox patch from 2015 to add crond.service: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.embedded.ptxdist.devel/13112 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.embedded.ptxdist.devel... * Denys Vlasenko is the person removing the ability for syslogd to inherit its socket (via a systemd mechanism) in the headlined patch. Here is the very same person adding that same code in the first place, back in 2011: http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=9b3b9790b32d440eb89af5edda70a66b1829e861 http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=9b3b9790b32d440eb8...

sandGorgon 11y ago

Interestingly, Busybox developers seem to have a lot of hate for sysv init. http://busybox.net/~vda/init_vs_runsv.html http://busybox.net/~vda/init_vs_runsv.html "SysV init must die."