4 ms·

Reading the full history of all the attempts at modernizing sysv I really do think Lennart deserves all the credit for making a car when everyone else made fast

by Spivak 2y ago

Reading the full history of all the attempts at modernizing sysv I really do think Lennart deserves all the credit for making a car when everyone else made faster horses. It's the true hacker spirit to look at problems with dizzying complexity and say, "eh give me a weekend." systemd really is a jewel of open source that did so many things right from the beginning that by the time it was done it made other hard problems outside of service management tractable.

7bit 2y ago
Man I love systemd. Never has it been easier for me to setup a binary as a service. I dread the memories of customizing or writing init scripts and dependencies. I don't get all the hate, that primarily argues about the philosophy of Linux, when the philosophy made everything just harder..but I guess some people just want to suffer for their believes, mich like some Catholics
- palata 2y ago
  I hate that "modern" developers think Linux == Ubuntu and write software that only supports Ubuntu. Same thing for systemd. "But it is just harder to learn how to write proper software that would work on a machine slightly different than my own"...
  - Spivak 2y ago
    What does "proper software" have to do with systemd? Sometimes upstream provides unit files but normally it's on the packager to provide the integration into your distro. I've seen some software depend on libsystemd for the sd_notify but I think after the whole security kerfuffle there won't be many of those anymore.
- chronid 2y ago
  The "hate" was not about the philosophy of linux. It was about the udev/systemd maintainers writing "fuck you Gentoo developers" in a mailing list when they wanted udev to support only systemd, actually that udev should be part of systemd (for no real reason) and reimplementing things (sometimes badly for years) instead of reusing what was in place. It was about pretty big bugs (I remember a bug around coredumps being cut at ~700MB in size, which the systemd maintainers responded with the equivalend "well that's your problem not ours, journald is not fast enough and so we cut the max size" and was only closed eventually - ~3 years - probably because some RH customer screamed loudly enough). And the original discussions were even before systemd decided to hardcode what essentially is random IP addresses into resolved ("maintainers should change those values if they don't like them!") and other network services (NTP? I don't remember now anymore). It was about the billion libraries (later on there have been some security fun issues) it brought in and made your stuff link to (I vaguely remember something to parse qr codes?). It was about not-documented DBUS interfaces and making DBUS a core part of the system... Most complex services still had heavy, long prestart script written in bash anyway at that point in time even when using systemd, so the script complexity was not really gone (and I think postgresql for example still has something like that). Now, Redhat pushed hard for it and you cannot just ignore what they do and go your own way since the number of maintainers they employ is massive along the entire stack, from kernel to GNOME - Systemd was convenient to use and people went for it even with all the issues it had/has for good reasons (same as pulseaudio), but thinking the only discussion at the time was about the "linux philosophy" is a strawman and changing history a fair bit. :)
- lmm 2y ago
  > Never has it been easier for me to setup a binary as a service. I dread the memories of customizing or writing init scripts and dependencies. If you just wanted simple/easy init scripts you could do that with runit for years without having to switch dozens of unrelated system components over to the systemd-approved version and render your system unbootable every so often.
  - jeltz 2y ago
    And that is a fair point. Sysvinit on the other hand was a total mess with almost all services being broken in some way.
akira2501 2y ago
They looked at the Microsoft stack and said "that'd be neat to have on linux!" Too bad they didn't look under the hood first.
- NekkoDroid 2y ago
  Actually it was looking more at Apple and launchd :)
- okanat 2y ago
  Windows has nothing equivalent to systemd. Windows "Task Scheduler" is very simplistic and disorganized compared to systemd. systemd is definitely one of the nicer things in the Linux world. I like it a lot and my team uses it extensively to precisely specify the behavior of our embedded products. systemd has a low memory footprint for what it does. It also helps us make our products more secure by making it easier to isolate processes / different system services as much as possible. So the risk of getting hacked over a network service is reduced a lot. Without systemd we would be forced to create our own which wouldn't be as secure.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > Windows has nothing equivalent to systemd. The service manager? It manages services with many of the same features of systemd units, including advanced features, like firewall integration. This is combined with windows event system which provides many of the same features of the systemd journal. > making it easier to isolate processes / different system services as much as possible These features are built into the operating system. systemd provides a particular method of accessing them, but certainly not the only one. > So the risk of getting hacked over a network service is reduced a lot. Your risk of getting hacked has nothing to do with systemd. You are hoping that the easy process isolation features you're referencing actually work and thus _mitigate_ the potential damage of that hack. This is not bad strategy, but is on it's own, entirely incomplete. > Without systemd we would be forced to create our own which wouldn't be as secure. At the risk of being hyper critical, this is precisely the type of logic I would use to sell snake oil, too.

by Spivak 2y ago

7bit 2y ago

Man I love systemd. Never has it been easier for me to setup a binary as a service. I dread the memories of customizing or writing init scripts and dependencies. I don't get all the hate, that primarily argues about the philosophy of Linux, when the philosophy made everything just harder..but I guess some people just want to suffer for their believes, mich like some Catholics

palata 2y ago
I hate that "modern" developers think Linux == Ubuntu and write software that only supports Ubuntu. Same thing for systemd. "But it is just harder to learn how to write proper software that would work on a machine slightly different than my own"...
- Spivak 2y ago
  What does "proper software" have to do with systemd? Sometimes upstream provides unit files but normally it's on the packager to provide the integration into your distro. I've seen some software depend on libsystemd for the sd_notify but I think after the whole security kerfuffle there won't be many of those anymore.
chronid 2y ago
The "hate" was not about the philosophy of linux. It was about the udev/systemd maintainers writing "fuck you Gentoo developers" in a mailing list when they wanted udev to support only systemd, actually that udev should be part of systemd (for no real reason) and reimplementing things (sometimes badly for years) instead of reusing what was in place. It was about pretty big bugs (I remember a bug around coredumps being cut at ~700MB in size, which the systemd maintainers responded with the equivalend "well that's your problem not ours, journald is not fast enough and so we cut the max size" and was only closed eventually - ~3 years - probably because some RH customer screamed loudly enough). And the original discussions were even before systemd decided to hardcode what essentially is random IP addresses into resolved ("maintainers should change those values if they don't like them!") and other network services (NTP? I don't remember now anymore). It was about the billion libraries (later on there have been some security fun issues) it brought in and made your stuff link to (I vaguely remember something to parse qr codes?). It was about not-documented DBUS interfaces and making DBUS a core part of the system... Most complex services still had heavy, long prestart script written in bash anyway at that point in time even when using systemd, so the script complexity was not really gone (and I think postgresql for example still has something like that). Now, Redhat pushed hard for it and you cannot just ignore what they do and go your own way since the number of maintainers they employ is massive along the entire stack, from kernel to GNOME - Systemd was convenient to use and people went for it even with all the issues it had/has for good reasons (same as pulseaudio), but thinking the only discussion at the time was about the "linux philosophy" is a strawman and changing history a fair bit. :)
lmm 2y ago
> Never has it been easier for me to setup a binary as a service. I dread the memories of customizing or writing init scripts and dependencies. If you just wanted simple/easy init scripts you could do that with runit for years without having to switch dozens of unrelated system components over to the systemd-approved version and render your system unbootable every so often.
- jeltz 2y ago
  And that is a fair point. Sysvinit on the other hand was a total mess with almost all services being broken in some way.

akira2501 2y ago

They looked at the Microsoft stack and said "that'd be neat to have on linux!" Too bad they didn't look under the hood first.

NekkoDroid 2y ago
Actually it was looking more at Apple and launchd :)
okanat 2y ago
Windows has nothing equivalent to systemd. Windows "Task Scheduler" is very simplistic and disorganized compared to systemd. systemd is definitely one of the nicer things in the Linux world. I like it a lot and my team uses it extensively to precisely specify the behavior of our embedded products. systemd has a low memory footprint for what it does. It also helps us make our products more secure by making it easier to isolate processes / different system services as much as possible. So the risk of getting hacked over a network service is reduced a lot. Without systemd we would be forced to create our own which wouldn't be as secure.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > Windows has nothing equivalent to systemd. The service manager? It manages services with many of the same features of systemd units, including advanced features, like firewall integration. This is combined with windows event system which provides many of the same features of the systemd journal. > making it easier to isolate processes / different system services as much as possible These features are built into the operating system. systemd provides a particular method of accessing them, but certainly not the only one. > So the risk of getting hacked over a network service is reduced a lot. Your risk of getting hacked has nothing to do with systemd. You are hoping that the easy process isolation features you're referencing actually work and thus _mitigate_ the potential damage of that hack. This is not bad strategy, but is on it's own, entirely incomplete. > Without systemd we would be forced to create our own which wouldn't be as secure. At the risk of being hyper critical, this is precisely the type of logic I would use to sell snake oil, too.