9 ms·

Talking about "technological and political issues" without mentioning any, or without mentioning which components would need to be revived, sounds a lot like FU

Talking about "technological and political issues" without mentioning any, or without mentioning which components would need to be revived, sounds a lot like FUD unfortunately. Mixing and matching traditional and systemd components is super common, for example Fedora and RHEL use chrony instead of timesyncd, and NetworkManager instead of networkd.

actionfromafar 2y ago
I read it as "we can sit in this more quiet room where people don't rave about systemd all day long".
- bonzini 2y ago
  But do they? Oxide targets the enterprise, and people there don't care that much about how the underlying OS works. It's been ten years since a RHEL release started using systemd and there has been no exodus to either Windows or Illumos. I don't mean FUD in a disparaging sense, more like literal fear of the unknown causing people to be excessively cautious. I wouldn't have any problem with Oxide saying "we went for what we know best", there's no need to fake that so much more research went into a decision.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    The underlying hyperwiser on oxide isn't exposed to the consumers of the API. Just like on Amazon. I think arguably the bhyve over KVM was the more fundamental reason, and bhyve doesn't run on linux anyway.
    - bonzini 2y ago
      Exactly, then why would they be dragged into systemd-or-not-systemd discussion? If you want to use Linux, use either Debian or the CentOS hyperscaler spin (the one that Meta uses) and call it a day. I am obviously biased as I am a KVM (and QEMU) developer myself, but I don't see any other plausible reason other than "we know the Illumos userspace best". Founder mode and all that. As to their choice of hypervisor, to be honest KVM on Illumos was probably not a great idea to begin with, therefore they used bhyve.
      - jclulow 2y ago
        FWIW, founder mode didn't exist five years ago when we were getting started! More seriously, though, this document (which I helped write) is an attempt specifically to avoid classic FUD tropes. It's not perfect, but it reflects certainly aspects of my lived experience in trying to get pieces of the Linux ecosystem to work in production settings. While it's true that I'm a dyed in the wool illumos person, being in the core team and so on, I have Linux desktops, and the occasional Linux system in lab environments. I have been supporting customers with all sorts of environments that I don't get to choose for most of my career, including Linux and Windows systems. At Joyent most of our customers were running hardware virtualised Linux and Windows guests, so it's not like I haven't had a fair amount of exposure. I've even spent several days getting SCO OpenServer to run under our KVM, for a customer, because I apparently make bad life choices! As for not discussing the social and political stuff in any depth, I felt at the time (and still do today) that so much ink had been split by all manner of folks talking about LKML or systemd project behaviour over the last decade that it was probably a distraction to do anything other than mention it in passing. As I believe I said in the podcast we did about this RFD recently: I'm not sure if this decision would be right for anybody else or not, but I believe it was and is right for us. I'm not trying to sell you, or anybody else, on making the same calls. This is just how we made our decision.
        bonzini 2y ago
        Founder mode existed, it just didn't have a catchy name. And I absolutely believe that it was the right choice for your team, exactly for "founder mode" reasons. In other words, I don't think that the social or technological reasons in the document were that strong, and that's fine. Rather, my external armchair impression is simply that OS and hypervisor were not something where you were willing to spend precious "risk points", and that's the right thing to do given that you had a lot more places that were an absolute jump in the dark.
        InvaderFizz 2y ago
        I would agree with that. Given the history of the Oxide team, they chose what they viewed was the best technology for THEM, as maintainers. The rest is mostly justification of that. That's just fine, as long as they're not choosing a clearly inferior long term option. The technically superior solution is not always the right solution for your organization given the priorities and capabilities of your team, and that's just fine! (I have no opinion on KVM vs bhyve, I don't know either deep enough to form one. I'm talking in general.)
- wmf 2y ago
  Instead people rave about Solaris.
packetlost 2y ago
The Oxide folks are rather vocal about their distaste for the Linux Foundation. FWIW I think they went with the right choice for them considering they'd rather sign up for maintaining the entire thing themselves than saddling themselves with the baggage of a Linux fork or upstreaming
netbsdusers 2y ago
> Talking about "technological and political issues" without mentioning any I don't know why you think none were mentioned - to name one, they link a GitHub issue created against the systemd repository by a Googler complaining that systemd is inappropriately using Google's NTP servers, which at the time were not a public service, and kindly asking for systemd to stop using them. This request was refused and the issue was closed and locked. Behaviour like this from the systemd maintainers can only appear bizarre, childish, and unreasonable to any unprejudiced observer, putting their character and integrity into question and casting doubt on whether they should be trusted with the maintenance of software so integral to at least a reasonably large minority of modern Linux systems.
- inftech 2y ago
  And people forget that this behavior of systemd devs is present in lots of other core projects of the Linux ecosystem. Unfortunately this makes modern Linux not reliable.
- suprjami 2y ago
  systemd made time servers a compile-time option and a warn if distros are using the default time servers: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/554 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/554 What's your suggested alternative? Using pool.ntp.org requires a vendor zone. systemd does not consider itself a vendor, it's the distros shipping systemd which are the vendor and should register and use their own vendor zone. I don't care about systemd either way, but your own false representation of facts makes your last paragraph apply to your "argument".
  - bigfatkitten 2y ago
    > What's your suggested alternative? That if they do not wish to ship a safe default, they do not ship a default at all.
    - suprjami 2y ago
      That would have been my preference too.

actionfromafar 2y ago

I read it as "we can sit in this more quiet room where people don't rave about systemd all day long".

bonzini 2y ago
But do they? Oxide targets the enterprise, and people there don't care that much about how the underlying OS works. It's been ten years since a RHEL release started using systemd and there has been no exodus to either Windows or Illumos. I don't mean FUD in a disparaging sense, more like literal fear of the unknown causing people to be excessively cautious. I wouldn't have any problem with Oxide saying "we went for what we know best", there's no need to fake that so much more research went into a decision.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  The underlying hyperwiser on oxide isn't exposed to the consumers of the API. Just like on Amazon. I think arguably the bhyve over KVM was the more fundamental reason, and bhyve doesn't run on linux anyway.
  - bonzini 2y ago
    Exactly, then why would they be dragged into systemd-or-not-systemd discussion? If you want to use Linux, use either Debian or the CentOS hyperscaler spin (the one that Meta uses) and call it a day. I am obviously biased as I am a KVM (and QEMU) developer myself, but I don't see any other plausible reason other than "we know the Illumos userspace best". Founder mode and all that. As to their choice of hypervisor, to be honest KVM on Illumos was probably not a great idea to begin with, therefore they used bhyve.
    - jclulow 2y ago
      FWIW, founder mode didn't exist five years ago when we were getting started! More seriously, though, this document (which I helped write) is an attempt specifically to avoid classic FUD tropes. It's not perfect, but it reflects certainly aspects of my lived experience in trying to get pieces of the Linux ecosystem to work in production settings. While it's true that I'm a dyed in the wool illumos person, being in the core team and so on, I have Linux desktops, and the occasional Linux system in lab environments. I have been supporting customers with all sorts of environments that I don't get to choose for most of my career, including Linux and Windows systems. At Joyent most of our customers were running hardware virtualised Linux and Windows guests, so it's not like I haven't had a fair amount of exposure. I've even spent several days getting SCO OpenServer to run under our KVM, for a customer, because I apparently make bad life choices! As for not discussing the social and political stuff in any depth, I felt at the time (and still do today) that so much ink had been split by all manner of folks talking about LKML or systemd project behaviour over the last decade that it was probably a distraction to do anything other than mention it in passing. As I believe I said in the podcast we did about this RFD recently: I'm not sure if this decision would be right for anybody else or not, but I believe it was and is right for us. I'm not trying to sell you, or anybody else, on making the same calls. This is just how we made our decision.
      - bonzini 2y ago
        Founder mode existed, it just didn't have a catchy name. And I absolutely believe that it was the right choice for your team, exactly for "founder mode" reasons. In other words, I don't think that the social or technological reasons in the document were that strong, and that's fine. Rather, my external armchair impression is simply that OS and hypervisor were not something where you were willing to spend precious "risk points", and that's the right thing to do given that you had a lot more places that were an absolute jump in the dark.
        InvaderFizz 2y ago
        I would agree with that. Given the history of the Oxide team, they chose what they viewed was the best technology for THEM, as maintainers. The rest is mostly justification of that. That's just fine, as long as they're not choosing a clearly inferior long term option. The technically superior solution is not always the right solution for your organization given the priorities and capabilities of your team, and that's just fine! (I have no opinion on KVM vs bhyve, I don't know either deep enough to form one. I'm talking in general.)
wmf 2y ago
Instead people rave about Solaris.

packetlost 2y ago

The Oxide folks are rather vocal about their distaste for the Linux Foundation. FWIW I think they went with the right choice for them considering they'd rather sign up for maintaining the entire thing themselves than saddling themselves with the baggage of a Linux fork or upstreaming

netbsdusers 2y ago

> Talking about "technological and political issues" without mentioning any I don't know why you think none were mentioned - to name one, they link a GitHub issue created against the systemd repository by a Googler complaining that systemd is inappropriately using Google's NTP servers, which at the time were not a public service, and kindly asking for systemd to stop using them. This request was refused and the issue was closed and locked. Behaviour like this from the systemd maintainers can only appear bizarre, childish, and unreasonable to any unprejudiced observer, putting their character and integrity into question and casting doubt on whether they should be trusted with the maintenance of software so integral to at least a reasonably large minority of modern Linux systems.

inftech 2y ago
And people forget that this behavior of systemd devs is present in lots of other core projects of the Linux ecosystem. Unfortunately this makes modern Linux not reliable.
suprjami 2y ago
systemd made time servers a compile-time option and a warn if distros are using the default time servers: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/554 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/554 What's your suggested alternative? Using pool.ntp.org requires a vendor zone. systemd does not consider itself a vendor, it's the distros shipping systemd which are the vendor and should register and use their own vendor zone. I don't care about systemd either way, but your own false representation of facts makes your last paragraph apply to your "argument".
- bigfatkitten 2y ago
  > What's your suggested alternative? That if they do not wish to ship a safe default, they do not ship a default at all.
  - suprjami 2y ago
    That would have been my preference too.