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All of these are false. It stores everything in binary logs, however your old system didn't store it at all. You had a daemon (syslog, rsyslog, etc) that wrote
by georgyo 10y ago
All of these are false.
It stores everything in binary logs, however your old system didn't store it at all. You had a daemon (syslog, rsyslog, etc) that wrote them as plain text. If you start those daemons, you at exactly the same spot as before. Just with an additional copy in a binary log. Which btw, journalctl can do some magical things, and you should take some time to play with it.
systemd is not monolithic, or at the very least its a distributed monolith. The vast majority of services happen in their own userspace process.
Systemd excels with servers, since it standardizes how their execution gets defined. It takes only an added line to spawn them in their own namespaces, set cgroup restrictions, prevent network access, etc. Before hand, doing these things was very hard, so no one did them.
- Sanddancer 10y agoIf you had a basic syslog setup, it stored as text files. However, a more interesting syslog setup would take those entries and send them to a remote database, filter them to match certain contents, run scripts based on those matches, etc. Systemd only seems magical because most distros don't use even a sliver of the abilities that modern syslogs provide. Systemd is a Jenga tower. Yes, there are lots of little pieces, and yes, removing a few won't hurt anything, but it's still fragile, and rather inconsistent. "Parts" like the journal, are a separate executable, but are not managed like other services. It uses a poorly documented ipc interface to talk to the various parts, and the configuration files are a nasty tangle of symlinks and control files stretching across the filesystem. It's just not a very well engineered piece of software.