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Alternate init systems (upstart etc.) have been trying to fix the sysvinit mess and failed to gain traction. Then systemd came along with a 'we do a little bit

Alternate init systems (upstart etc.) have been trying to fix the sysvinit mess and failed to gain traction. Then systemd came along with a 'we do a little bit more' approach and all relevant distributions (yes, really) could agree upon using it. I'm very happy the Linux world did something contrary to the Unix wars where everyone was trying to reinvent the wheel until everything collapsed.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Gaining traction often has very little to do with technical superiority, especially when considering long-term fragility or monopolisation of a space. Systemd has been relentlessly pursued by Red Hat. It's won over some technical advocates, but created numerous enemies and critics. Ted T'so is quoted in the LWN piece. Linus himself has been diplomatic but pretty critical, at least in past (I've not seen any specific comments in the past 2-4 years AFAIR). When it first appeared on the scene, systemd was promised as a way of shaving a few seconds off of boots. That's not something I was ever particularly interested in (my systems reboot infrequently, I'm more concerned that they come up clean, reliably, and deterministically, than fast). Meantime, systemd is now taking over my logs, network, device tree, time service, cron, and more. The walk's not matching the talk. The complexity and insecurities remain. And yes, trying to maintain backwards (to sysvinit) or sidewards (to upstart, if that's even still alive, openrc, runit, eudev, procd, nosh, finit, ...) is difficult. It also concedes the initiative (init-iative?) to systemd. Standards wars against well-heeled forces are exceedingly difficult. Even when technology and history are on your side. And now for my talk on the year of Linux on the desktop....
- Quekid5 7y ago
  > Meantime, systemd is now taking over my logs, network, device tree, time service, cron, and more. This is a misrepresentation. It does have components for all of those things, but AFAIK only journald and udev (I think) are non-optional. You're free to use cron, chrony (NTP), NetworkManager (or whatever), etc.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    The point isn't what I can or can't do (though I'm finding the encroachment despite my attempts to avoid it), the point remains that was billed as faster boot times. It's become vastly more than that. Source: the central responsibility of an init system is to bring up userspace. And a good init system does that fast. Unfortunately, the traditional SysV init system was not particularly fast. http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html And in case that's been modified, the earliest archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20100503054610/0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100503054610/0pointer.de/blog/... Discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308367 And on LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/385536/ https://lwn.net/Articles/385536/ Also on LWN, "Systemd as Tragedy", from January 2019: https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/ https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/ Also discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19023232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19023232

dredmorbius 7y ago

Gaining traction often has very little to do with technical superiority, especially when considering long-term fragility or monopolisation of a space. Systemd has been relentlessly pursued by Red Hat. It's won over some technical advocates, but created numerous enemies and critics. Ted T'so is quoted in the LWN piece. Linus himself has been diplomatic but pretty critical, at least in past (I've not seen any specific comments in the past 2-4 years AFAIR). When it first appeared on the scene, systemd was promised as a way of shaving a few seconds off of boots. That's not something I was ever particularly interested in (my systems reboot infrequently, I'm more concerned that they come up clean, reliably, and deterministically, than fast). Meantime, systemd is now taking over my logs, network, device tree, time service, cron, and more. The walk's not matching the talk. The complexity and insecurities remain. And yes, trying to maintain backwards (to sysvinit) or sidewards (to upstart, if that's even still alive, openrc, runit, eudev, procd, nosh, finit, ...) is difficult. It also concedes the initiative (init-iative?) to systemd. Standards wars against well-heeled forces are exceedingly difficult. Even when technology and history are on your side. And now for my talk on the year of Linux on the desktop....

Quekid5 7y ago
> Meantime, systemd is now taking over my logs, network, device tree, time service, cron, and more. This is a misrepresentation. It does have components for all of those things, but AFAIK only journald and udev (I think) are non-optional. You're free to use cron, chrony (NTP), NetworkManager (or whatever), etc.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The point isn't what I can or can't do (though I'm finding the encroachment despite my attempts to avoid it), the point remains that was billed as faster boot times. It's become vastly more than that. Source: the central responsibility of an init system is to bring up userspace. And a good init system does that fast. Unfortunately, the traditional SysV init system was not particularly fast. http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html And in case that's been modified, the earliest archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20100503054610/0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100503054610/0pointer.de/blog/... Discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308367 And on LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/385536/ https://lwn.net/Articles/385536/ Also on LWN, "Systemd as Tragedy", from January 2019: https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/ https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/ Also discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19023232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19023232