20 ms·

PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

106 points by alex14fr 4y ago

tannhaeuser 4y ago
Actually, according to TFA, he's already left RedHat some time ago.
traverseda 4y ago
Considering the... magnitude of his contributions I'm surprised that there isn't some kind of press release floating around somewhere.
dane-pgp 4y ago
Maybe he'll go on to become an Executive Vice President at Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
- shrubble 4y ago
  I was thinking about Rick Belluzzo's time at SGI when I read your comment.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo
- rasz 4y ago
  cough Miguel de Icaza cough
  - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
    Miguel criticized MS recently so this path might be closed for him.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Miguel de Icaza left Microsoft in March, 2022.
      - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
        Ok, so they hired Lennaert as replacement, finally!
        rasz 4y ago
        not so surprised pikachu face https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-Creator-Microsoft https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-... Good job Lennart destroying Linux from inside.
        dane-pgp 4y ago
        Called it!
        hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
        This is an interesting development, to say the least. If they give him enough power, he can create havoc in Microsoft. Could be fun to watch.
BlackLotus89 4y ago
Was happy seeing him comment on a systemd bug I opened a while ago. Should answer as well...
alfalfasprout 4y ago
He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon.
- traverseda 4y ago
  I think that Redhat gave him a privileged position to make that impact from, and I'm not sure that he'll make a similar impact without similar political backing, but I suppose time will tell.
  - darthrupert 4y ago
    It's a fact of life that people get old and thus become less effective at making great changes. I cannot think of many counter-examples from our field.
    - robonerd 4y ago
      Sickboy's Philosophy of Life. We all get old and cannae hack it anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94jraWNG-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94jraWNG-g
- zh3 4y ago
  Eh, Pulseaudio. One of those things that on the rare occasion it's worked out of the box it's then broken with one step of the beaten path. Evidently it seems to work for many people, the trouble it's caused has far outweighed any benefit (plus I know quite a few people dropped firefox for chrome when it went pulseaudio only - is that still the case?).
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can perform mixing, assume it doesn't change configuration, assume there's only one user, assume (or want to assume) it has a specific sample rate, etc. PulseAudio papers over this stuff and deals with permissions, so your applications can actually work. If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Linux audio has more than its fair share of problems in the stack, but in my experience, PulseAudio is more of a solver of problems and less of a source of problems.
humanwhosits 4y ago
Interested to see what he chooses to work on now
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  Maybe he's turning to the graphic stack (eg a grand unified graphics driver architecture), or redoes large parts of the kernel in Rust ;) Or something like that; I've got a hard time thinking what could be challenging enough seeing as, though controversial his creations are, he sure is able to deliver.
  - iasay 4y ago
    At least we will know to steer clear of it until he stops winning Pwnies.
- stryan 4y ago
  Judging from the email in the article, systemd is still his main priority (which makes sense). With system-homed/etc he's been trying out some pretty interesting new ideas, so I wonder if RedHat has just been a too conservative for him now that systemd's off the ground and embed into distros.
  - evol262 4y ago
    There was always a mixed ecosystem. At one point, we were using Chef, Ansible, Puppet, AND Salt both internally and in shipping projects. systemd-homed, systemd-nspawn as isolation, and the rest of his ideas aren't being held back because they're controversial, it's because OStree/Atomic "lost" more or less the instant Red Hat purchased CoreOS and they didn't need to build their own de-novo k8s compute distro (parts of OStree lived on in CoreOS and are there as a testbed for immutable images for trusted computing in kiosks/appliances/VDI). systemd-homed, using systemd-nspawn for management, and the rest go directly against the investments which have been made in [fedora-]toolbox, rootless podman, and flatpak. At the time that I left (~2 years ago), "Openshift is the new platform" was the phrase of the day, which means podman "won". Red Hat/IBM (via the container toolkit, rootless podman, etc) is/was primarily invested in a growth sector, which desktop/server Linux is/was not, and the Container Development Kit, rootless podman, and the rest are direct mechanisms to get containers sold on k8s and openshift. Lennart's passion projects are great for Linux, and maybe better ideas than Flatpak and Snap. They don't have a business case inside Redhat, though, and there's only so long that even a principal consulting engineer can essentially spend his time on research projects. I would guess that he wanted to put more effort into an overhaul of CoreOS/OSTree and try to "unify" it with flatpak somehow to get back to "one Linux" instead of split distros for different cases, didn't get traction, and decided to go somewhere he could work on a passion project.
robonerd 4y ago
Is he retiring? Is it time for champagne?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  That depends very much on where he lands. Rumors have it that Linus is considering transferring kernel maintainer duties so let's not put the flag out just yet. Ok, just kidding ;)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
tpush 4y ago
My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.
- corrral 4y ago
  People dislike his work for various reasons but are still forced to use it thanks, in part, to his employer promoting it aggressively (it's not like he did all this for free). That's a recipe for saltiness. Kinda like Bill Gates back in the day (remember that "Kill Bill" game, and other similar ones?)
  - esarbe 4y ago
    No one is forced to use it - you can always switch distro. I also use hyperbole as a rhetoric instrument but in text seldom works.
    - corrral 4y ago
      At work you may not have that choice, especially since all the most-used (so, best supported) distros are deep into systemd now, or if you have a distro that you otherwise like but that has switched to systemd. It's possible to prefer something over alternatives but still think it's worse than it used to be, or could be better, or to very much dislike one part of it. Again, much like Windows and other MS products. People effectively had to use them ("well technically they could quit their jobs instead, so they didn't really have to"—LOL), which sets up circumstances for some serious hate. To repeat what I've written elsewhere, no-one is upset with any other init system or audio daemon creators, even if they don't like the software. Something different happened with these projects.
      - JetSpiegel 4y ago
        > well technically they could quit their jobs instead, so they didn't really have to There are jobs which force you to use Linux, and SystemD in particular? Where do I sign up?
mnd999 4y ago
I reckon he’s a lot less employable than he thinks he is.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  Even assuming a non-controversial person, it's very hard to find a corporation willing to employ a dedicated, fully commited to upstream, foss, Linux Desktop experience developer.
  - mnd999 4y ago
    I can’t imagine how to face an interview panel knowing you’ve pissed at least one of them off already before you even arrived.
JetSpiegel 4y ago
Here's documentation about the old SysVInit "system" of cobbled together hacks: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SysVinit#Writing_rc.d_scripts https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SysVinit#Writing_rc.d_scrip... Note the missing features, which I would call dealbreakers: - How do I know if a daemon is running? What if you several "copies" of the same daemon, like multiple OpenVPN connections? - How do you test if your cron script runs with the correct environment variables when it runs at 4AM? How can you test it with the same environment that will be set at 4AM, if you can only run it only on the interactive bash shell? - Say you want to change an environment variable from a daemon shipped by your distro. Are you sure you included all " and ' on your arbitrary shell program pretending to be configuration? Can you lint your change or do you just pray, reboot and get an emergency shell? - Freaking dependencies. Parallel startup? Making your webserver automatically wait for the NFS mounts? Make you sshd not wait for NFS mounts? Make sure your sshd starts even if NFS fails, so that you can actually reboot the machine remotely? Here's how this can be done with SystemD, it's all supported and it works: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Writing_unit_files https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Writing_unit_files I'm not talking about spherical cows, just basic server administration problems. Don't get me started on laptops...
m0llusk 4y ago
Ugh, this thread! For years I pleaded with people to understand that there was value to being able to start up in a deterministic manner, but some shell scripts that don't actually work are supposed to be enough? Then someone finally solves the problem and it is written off as some kind of weird corporate control move. And people could still come up with some kind of alternative, but the open source movement that solved problems for people has been replaced by a hostile cargo cult. At least I get to use systemd not just for reliable start up but also controlling the services that so many applications are made of nowadays. But it feels like some terrible Balkan conflict that just won't simmer down.
alex-robbins 4y ago
Does anyone know if Poettering has discovered NixOS yet? I'm reminded of it when I read some of his blog posts like this one [1]. It's hard to describe why, but I feel like he might be able to do a lot with what NixOS offers. [1]: https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html
- vamega 4y ago
  He’s definitely aware of it. I’ve seen him comment on issues related to NixOs before. Most recently I think I saw him comment on an issue around LoadCredential not being available in ExecPreStart
mtbkvc 4y ago
I personally think Lennart is a cool dude. I wonder where can a person like he go next, I hope it's not Microsoft
- ephbit 4y ago
  > Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-Creator-Microsoft https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-...

106 points by alex14fr 4y ago

Actually, according to TFA, he's already left RedHat some time ago.

Considering the... magnitude of his contributions I'm surprised that there isn't some kind of press release floating around somewhere.

dane-pgp 4y ago

Maybe he'll go on to become an Executive Vice President at Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop

shrubble 4y ago
I was thinking about Rick Belluzzo's time at SGI when I read your comment.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo
rasz 4y ago
cough Miguel de Icaza cough
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  Miguel criticized MS recently so this path might be closed for him.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Miguel de Icaza left Microsoft in March, 2022.
    - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
      Ok, so they hired Lennaert as replacement, finally!
      - rasz 4y ago
        not so surprised pikachu face https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-Creator-Microsoft https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-... Good job Lennart destroying Linux from inside.
        dane-pgp 4y ago
        Called it!
        hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
        This is an interesting development, to say the least. If they give him enough power, he can create havoc in Microsoft. Could be fun to watch.

BlackLotus89 4y ago

Was happy seeing him comment on a systemd bug I opened a while ago. Should answer as well...

alfalfasprout 4y ago

He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon.

traverseda 4y ago
I think that Redhat gave him a privileged position to make that impact from, and I'm not sure that he'll make a similar impact without similar political backing, but I suppose time will tell.
- darthrupert 4y ago
  It's a fact of life that people get old and thus become less effective at making great changes. I cannot think of many counter-examples from our field.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    Sickboy's Philosophy of Life. We all get old and cannae hack it anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94jraWNG-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94jraWNG-g
zh3 4y ago
Eh, Pulseaudio. One of those things that on the rare occasion it's worked out of the box it's then broken with one step of the beaten path. Evidently it seems to work for many people, the trouble it's caused has far outweighed any benefit (plus I know quite a few people dropped firefox for chrome when it went pulseaudio only - is that still the case?).
- klodolph 4y ago
  I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can perform mixing, assume it doesn't change configuration, assume there's only one user, assume (or want to assume) it has a specific sample rate, etc. PulseAudio papers over this stuff and deals with permissions, so your applications can actually work. If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Linux audio has more than its fair share of problems in the stack, but in my experience, PulseAudio is more of a solver of problems and less of a source of problems.

humanwhosits 4y ago

Interested to see what he chooses to work on now

tannhaeuser 4y ago
Maybe he's turning to the graphic stack (eg a grand unified graphics driver architecture), or redoes large parts of the kernel in Rust ;) Or something like that; I've got a hard time thinking what could be challenging enough seeing as, though controversial his creations are, he sure is able to deliver.
- iasay 4y ago
  At least we will know to steer clear of it until he stops winning Pwnies.
stryan 4y ago
Judging from the email in the article, systemd is still his main priority (which makes sense). With system-homed/etc he's been trying out some pretty interesting new ideas, so I wonder if RedHat has just been a too conservative for him now that systemd's off the ground and embed into distros.
- evol262 4y ago
  There was always a mixed ecosystem. At one point, we were using Chef, Ansible, Puppet, AND Salt both internally and in shipping projects. systemd-homed, systemd-nspawn as isolation, and the rest of his ideas aren't being held back because they're controversial, it's because OStree/Atomic "lost" more or less the instant Red Hat purchased CoreOS and they didn't need to build their own de-novo k8s compute distro (parts of OStree lived on in CoreOS and are there as a testbed for immutable images for trusted computing in kiosks/appliances/VDI). systemd-homed, using systemd-nspawn for management, and the rest go directly against the investments which have been made in [fedora-]toolbox, rootless podman, and flatpak. At the time that I left (~2 years ago), "Openshift is the new platform" was the phrase of the day, which means podman "won". Red Hat/IBM (via the container toolkit, rootless podman, etc) is/was primarily invested in a growth sector, which desktop/server Linux is/was not, and the Container Development Kit, rootless podman, and the rest are direct mechanisms to get containers sold on k8s and openshift. Lennart's passion projects are great for Linux, and maybe better ideas than Flatpak and Snap. They don't have a business case inside Redhat, though, and there's only so long that even a principal consulting engineer can essentially spend his time on research projects. I would guess that he wanted to put more effort into an overhaul of CoreOS/OSTree and try to "unify" it with flatpak somehow to get back to "one Linux" instead of split distros for different cases, didn't get traction, and decided to go somewhere he could work on a passion project.

robonerd 4y ago

Is he retiring? Is it time for champagne?

jacquesm 4y ago
That depends very much on where he lands. Rumors have it that Linus is considering transferring kernel maintainer duties so let's not put the flag out just yet. Ok, just kidding ;)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

tpush 4y ago

My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.

corrral 4y ago
People dislike his work for various reasons but are still forced to use it thanks, in part, to his employer promoting it aggressively (it's not like he did all this for free). That's a recipe for saltiness. Kinda like Bill Gates back in the day (remember that "Kill Bill" game, and other similar ones?)
- esarbe 4y ago
  No one is forced to use it - you can always switch distro. I also use hyperbole as a rhetoric instrument but in text seldom works.
  - corrral 4y ago
    At work you may not have that choice, especially since all the most-used (so, best supported) distros are deep into systemd now, or if you have a distro that you otherwise like but that has switched to systemd. It's possible to prefer something over alternatives but still think it's worse than it used to be, or could be better, or to very much dislike one part of it. Again, much like Windows and other MS products. People effectively had to use them ("well technically they could quit their jobs instead, so they didn't really have to"—LOL), which sets up circumstances for some serious hate. To repeat what I've written elsewhere, no-one is upset with any other init system or audio daemon creators, even if they don't like the software. Something different happened with these projects.
    - JetSpiegel 4y ago
      > well technically they could quit their jobs instead, so they didn't really have to There are jobs which force you to use Linux, and SystemD in particular? Where do I sign up?

mnd999 4y ago

I reckon he’s a lot less employable than he thinks he is.

ElectricalUnion 4y ago
Even assuming a non-controversial person, it's very hard to find a corporation willing to employ a dedicated, fully commited to upstream, foss, Linux Desktop experience developer.
- mnd999 4y ago
  I can’t imagine how to face an interview panel knowing you’ve pissed at least one of them off already before you even arrived.

JetSpiegel 4y ago

Here's documentation about the old SysVInit "system" of cobbled together hacks: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SysVinit#Writing_rc.d_scripts https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SysVinit#Writing_rc.d_scrip... Note the missing features, which I would call dealbreakers: - How do I know if a daemon is running? What if you several "copies" of the same daemon, like multiple OpenVPN connections? - How do you test if your cron script runs with the correct environment variables when it runs at 4AM? How can you test it with the same environment that will be set at 4AM, if you can only run it only on the interactive bash shell? - Say you want to change an environment variable from a daemon shipped by your distro. Are you sure you included all " and ' on your arbitrary shell program pretending to be configuration? Can you lint your change or do you just pray, reboot and get an emergency shell? - Freaking dependencies. Parallel startup? Making your webserver automatically wait for the NFS mounts? Make you sshd not wait for NFS mounts? Make sure your sshd starts even if NFS fails, so that you can actually reboot the machine remotely? Here's how this can be done with SystemD, it's all supported and it works: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Writing_unit_files https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Writing_unit_files I'm not talking about spherical cows, just basic server administration problems. Don't get me started on laptops...

m0llusk 4y ago

Ugh, this thread! For years I pleaded with people to understand that there was value to being able to start up in a deterministic manner, but some shell scripts that don't actually work are supposed to be enough? Then someone finally solves the problem and it is written off as some kind of weird corporate control move. And people could still come up with some kind of alternative, but the open source movement that solved problems for people has been replaced by a hostile cargo cult. At least I get to use systemd not just for reliable start up but also controlling the services that so many applications are made of nowadays. But it feels like some terrible Balkan conflict that just won't simmer down.

alex-robbins 4y ago

Does anyone know if Poettering has discovered NixOS yet? I'm reminded of it when I read some of his blog posts like this one [1]. It's hard to describe why, but I feel like he might be able to do a lot with what NixOS offers. [1]: https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html

vamega 4y ago
He’s definitely aware of it. I’ve seen him comment on issues related to NixOs before. Most recently I think I saw him comment on an issue around LoadCredential not being available in ExecPreStart

mtbkvc 4y ago

I personally think Lennart is a cool dude. I wonder where can a person like he go next, I hope it's not Microsoft

ephbit 4y ago
> Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-Creator-Microsoft https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-...