15 ms·

Boycott systemd

258 points by martinp 12y ago

SnakeDoc 12y ago
Just pointing out it's not that difficult to "roll your own" linux distro. It'll take you an afternoon if you haven't done it before... and you can very well choose to keep using sysvinit if you want (my personal distro will use sysvinit probably until the end of the year when I have time to figure out how to integrate systemd).
mordae 12y ago
> Contribute to and use distros like Slackware and CRUX that follow traditional Unix paradigms. Made my day. Emphasis mine.
- josteink 12y ago
  The good thing about Slackware is that it acts as a timemachine for how Unix/Linux used to be back in the mid-90s. When the neckbeards comes around complaining about "Unix philosophy" you can always tell them to use Slackware. And then watch them go silent.
_pmf_ 12y ago
At https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_init_systems https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_init_systems all of the features that are unique to systemd are immediately something that I'd rather not have integrated.
adimania 12y ago
It is Linux. Let systemd live and if you don't like it, switch to upstart. No one is stopping you.
- lmedinas 12y ago
  Actually it's not like this. On FOSS when there is no manpower distros need to make a choice: supporting the software themselves or pick the maintained solution. So when upstart developed slowed down, by other words Canonical pulled resources from it, it was when they made the decision to switch to systemd. Also the cost of maintain it and adapt applications who are tied to systemd is much more larger than adopting syetemd. The only viable solution i'm seeing right now is: Use a mainstream distro with systemd or switch to other one which maintains their own init system like Slackware or Gentoo.
- chronid 12y ago
  It's (slowly) becoming impossible.
  - pekk 12y ago
    This is the "TempleOS impulse". The feeling of disgust with byzantine complexity, driving an impulse to start clean and chase the money changers out of the temple
    - voidz 12y ago
      Upvoted for mentioning TempleOS, I have never been more frightened when reading about OSs.
mateuszf 12y ago
Em .. no, thank you. I think that systemd is a good step in the direction of unifying different distributions. Also, many argument presented on that page have been debunked or are actually good things.
- tmikaeld 12y ago
  I agree, i find it very hard to believe that so many distos would make the wrong choice here.
  - Fuxy 12y ago
    It's the best option at the moment arguably not perfect but better then anything else out there. I wish the owner of that website would would make a better alternative instead of complaining.
    - kourt 12y ago
      I think the concern is that systemd is following a rapid "embrace, extend, extinguish" path, and very quickly will have achieved critical mass and become somewhat unstoppable. There's nothing wrong with saying "I like Linux, but it's becoming Lennartix and I'm concerned."
  - makomk 12y ago
    They made the only choice. Because various applications are now dependent on systemd APIs in order to function correctly, and those APIs in turn can only be implemented by an init system that is structured the same way as systemd, it's essentially impossible to use anything else. Someone could come up with an alternative to systemd that was superior in every other way and it'd be impossible to move to it. (Hell, it'd have been impossible to move to systemd in the first place if the existing init system was so closely entwined with everything else.)
- cheery 12y ago
  Are you kidding? Already the reason 1. is crippling Linux and what it stands for. All points combined mean that if you include this in distribution, that distribution will stagnate and die.
blueskin_ 12y ago
I'd rather see init's problems fixed (i.e. start services in parallel), but systemd is far better than upstart (edit: got it to load at last, I see it's not by upstart fans, so ignore that last part). That said, a lot of systemd seems like a really stupid idea to me, e.g. binary logs, the massively increased SPOF size, and the "do everything" mentality. Unfortunately, I don't know of any distros that aren't using it now (edit: I didn't even realise Slackware was still a thing...), and upstart is even more of a joke than systemd.
- crashandburn4 12y ago
  I've got to agree with a lot of your points here, to paraphrase churchill, systemd is the worst system management daemon system that we have, except for all those other ones that have been tried from time to time. (this sounds a little harsh to the other ones, but I find systemd intuitive from a user-facing perspective even if it does have a lot of inelegance under the hood) [0] http://wais.stanford.edu/Democracy/democracy_DemocracyAndChurchill(090503).html http://wais.stanford.edu/Democracy/democracy_DemocracyAndChu...
- quasque 12y ago
  What's wrong with binary logs? Seems like an improvement, given how they can be cryptographically 'sealed' to help tamper detection, and have indexes built in [1]. [1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-files/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-fil...
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Sealing sounds interesting, but that page doesn't explain why can't plain-text logs be sealed.
  - mrweasel 12y ago
    Binary logs are pretty annoying because your standard tools for searching through them no longer works. tail, less, grep, wc and similar tools are rendered useless. Newer tools like logstash or Splunk are also going to have issues reading your binary logs. It's not really a wise thing to break the tools that most people use every day, it's just going to make them hate you.
andrelaszlo 12y ago
Tom Gundersen discussed the move to systemd on the Arch Linux forums a couple of years ago. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530 Summary: 0) it is hotplug capable 1) we can know the state of the system 2) it is modular 3) it allows dbus/udev to go back to doing the task they are meant to do 4) we can reduce the number of explicit ordering dependencies between daemons 5) we get a lot of security/sandboxing features for free 6) systemd service files can be written and distributed upstream 7) systemd is a cross-distro project 8) logind will finally deliver on what consolekit was supposed to do 9) systemd is fast
- antocv 12y ago
  DMD has all those advantages as well. Dmd is the gnu daemon managing daemons.
  - davexunit 12y ago
    I'm very excited about dmd. It's being developed in conjunction with the Guix project for an official GNU distribution. I hope to soon steer clear of this systemd mess by using a Guix system running dmd.
    - antocv 12y ago
      Yeah me too, and we can help, get on the guix-devel list and try to follow, learn guile/scheme and such. Im planning at least to provide more documentation, when I learn guix and dmd more.
      - davexunit 12y ago
        I'm a Guix contributor. Haven't hacked on dmd yet, though.
        antocv 12y ago
        Youre doing awesome work!
ealexhudson 12y ago
'systemd flies in the face of the Unix philosophy: "do one thing and do it well," representing a complex collection of dozens of binaries' So, a collection of lots of single-purpose binaries that work together flies in the face of "do one thing and do it well". I kinda stopped reading at this point, which was sadly quite high up the page.
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  I think the point is you can't replace each of those binaries with alternatives. The monolithic nature of systemd is not just a function of the raw number of binaries involved.
  - zokier 12y ago
    > I think the point is you can't replace each of those binaries with alternatives Is there any reason why you couldn't do so? Found this chart: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePortabilityAndStabilityChart/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePo... Note the columns "Reimplementable Independently" and "Known Other Implementations"
    - makomk 12y ago
      Those are the external APIs that the various parts of systemd expose to non-systemd applications, the internal APIs are not documented and are subject to change. Basically, you can't just replace part of systemd, you need to write replacements for the whole thing that reimplement all the same APIs in ways that are compatible with it because stuff like Gnome now relies on them. That's part of the reason why Ubuntu gave up and switched to systemd - a lot of the desktop stuff they shipped relies on logind etc upstream, and it just wouldn't be practical for them to implement their own versions of everything that got Borged by systemd. (Edit: in fact, that page lists logind as something that cannot be independently reimplemented or used separately from systemd.)
    - cthalupa 12y ago
      Something being (theoretically) possible doesn't mean it's practical. The attitude of the systemd (And Freedesktop.org folks in general - and please don't give us the usual Lennart cry of "No really, we're NOT the freedesktop.org people!" - despite all of these projects sharing a tightly knit community of people steering them) devs and their treatment of their projects has meant for some you basically do things their way or the highway.[1] It's already a pain in the ass to strip udev out to keep using it if you've decided to not use systemd. And that's just taking one portion of the system that was promised to be kept easily independent of the rest of the muck, not trying to make other services work within the framework of a systemd system. As it becomes the standard across all of the major distros, I find it hard to believe that it will become easier to separate systemd parts from one another than it is now, because there becomes even less incentive to do so. I don't have much of a horse in this race, because I've long since migrated the vast majority of my production systems to FreeBSD and OmniOS, and out of the few that I have that are running linux still, some of them are using systemd. I don't particularly like it, but instead of complaining about it and doing nothing, I've minimized the impact I feel from it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7534583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7534583
nifoc 12y ago
> Consider migrating to BSD, Plan 9 or something similar, if things get really out of hand. I can understand suggesting to migrate to BSD, but Plan 9? Seriously? And what's the purpose of the "Open Source Tea Party" picture? This surely is not the only picture of Lennart in existence.
foxylad 12y ago
Given that both systemd and upstart exist, it would seem that it is time for a next generation init. And given that Ubuntu has now accepted systemd, it has critical mass and should be the new standard. "Doing one thing and doing it well" is a fine guide for system tools, but does not apply to everything - look at the kernel, or Gnome for instance.
Grue3 12y ago
I'm getting code 500 error, but I'm guessing a Republican has been discovered to be somehow related to systemd.
klaasvakie 12y ago
Does anyone know if this quote is true?: "Since systemd is very tightly welded with the Linux kernel API, this also makes different systemd versions incompatible with different kernel versions." I was pretty meh about the whole systemd thing, but having to change userspace when swopping out kernels is a spectacular disadvantage. Imagine having to downgrade your distro whenever you need to test against older kernels --- madness. This is especially bad with ARM/embedded stuff where one often runs a modern userspace with an older kernel.
- cnvogel 12y ago
  In my experiece, upgrading the kernel to a newer one is not a problem. What can happen, though, is that an upgrade of userspace will suddenly require a kernel-feature not present, if you run an ancient board-support-package with a 3.0-kernel or so in 2014! (happened to me with a BSP for a Freescale i.MX6). So, if you have archlinux tracking the latest and greatest systemd, uptrading userland can make your machine no longer bring up everything (completely). But in my case the kernel is from 2011...
  - klaasvakie 12y ago
    I have an i.MX5 BSP with a 2.6.xx era kernel :( Can you give an example of the "no longer bring up everything (completely)"?
    - cnvogel 12y ago
      After putting a current arch-linux rootfs[1] on the box[2], it seems to come up, just network and console seems to be misconfigured, but this, I think, I had to fix the last time also. So: indeed the current systemd seems to work on a iMX6 running a 3.0 kernel. [1] ArchLinuxARM-imx6-latest.tar.gz from http://archlinuxarm.org/developers/downloads http://archlinuxarm.org/developers/downloads [2] Phytec PhyFlex i.MX6 http://www.phytec.de/de/produkte/system-on-modules/produktdetails/p/phyflex-imx-6-3.html http://www.phytec.de/de/produkte/system-on-modules/produktde...
      - 12y ago
vidarh 12y ago
They'd get much further if they actually came up with a better alternative. Even if all of there points were objectively true, it doesn't matter when sticking with the old init is so much worse in many ways. People aren't picking systemd because it's perfect, but because both the mess of init scripts it is replacing, and alternatives like upstart,is seen as worse/too lacking. EDIT: Btw. this just got me to install systemd on one of our dev/test Debian boxes at work, to start testing it.
theanirudh 12y ago
The author of systemd, Lennart Poettering busts some systemd myths in his blog post http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html
- barkingcat 12y ago
  it sounds like a lot of the complaints were of the "this makes things easier and smells like it's not the lovechild borne of any arcane hacker and I refuse to read documentation" variety.
- espadrine 12y ago
  There's one thing that the boycott post gets right, that Mr Poettering doesn't address, which is: > 2. systemd's journal files (handled by journald) are stored in a complicated binary format. Mr Poettering tackles the myth that configuration files are binary (they are very obviously not). That said, I am not sure how to get the journaling data in an Upstart system, nor in a sysvinit one.
- cakeface 12y ago
  Also, I highly recommend reading Lennart Poettering's initial description of systemd on his blog [1]. It lays out the paradigms behind systemd design really well. I think that it is important to understand the problems that systemd is trying to solve in order to evaluate whether it is doing it's job well. [1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
lmedinas 12y ago
Systemd got a huge boost due the involved from Red Hat. But then most of the distros are adopting it, even Debian and Ubuntu. I don't see a reason but still if you want to stay out of systemd better use Gentoo or other "non" major distro.
- mateuszf 12y ago
  The reason is that it's awesome.
lvillani 12y ago
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zylqvGo21_oJ:boycottsystemd.org/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zylqvGo... (the site is unreachable at the moment).
nemasu 12y ago
Okay, well, while I agree with most of the points they make, there just isn't a viable alternative. I maintain noop Linux (nooplinux.org), it started using OpenRC, but when udev was merged into systemd, things got very complicated, eventually the switch was made. Systemd is very fast, the 'init.d' scripts are way better, udev work very well...I don't mind thinking about moving back away from systemd (because I really do have a love-hate relationship with it), but what am I supposed to go back to? OpenRC/SysV-whatever? Heck no. Upstart? Nope. ...is there even an alternative that makes sense? Because moving back to SysV would be a step back.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  >it started using OpenRC, but when udev was merged into systemd, things got very complicated I got past that by using eudev with OpenRC on Gentoo.
  - jbergstroem 12y ago
    For uncomplicated systems (such as virtual machines, servers and whatnot) there's mdev in busybox.
SEMW 12y ago
"Unix philosophy" seems to be one of those phrases that everyone likes agreeing with because you can use it to either justify or condemn anything you like. E.g. you could perfectly plausibly make the argument that systemd's return to inetd-style service starting (on-demand and in-parallel through socket activation) is a lot more unix-philosophy-like than the SysVinit way.
- cturner 12y ago
  Agree, but SysV-init isn't notably unixy. In general, SysV distros raced to embrace and extend away from the mainstream. That created lots of un-unixy subsystems that live on in linux. Quick wave in the direction of three - NFS, wacky IPC systems, SysVinit. SysVinit is complicated - it wants to be a DSL but is still a shell hack-together. It's inflexible - it's a dependency tracking system, but you can't easily adapt it for userspace launch control, or as a build tool. It doesn't do one thing well. (e.g. doesn't reliably contain a process tree, there are still situations where you want to use pid files or complicated ps greps). Init is a hard problem. From what I can see all the unix derivatives have made a mess of it. I've had fleeting attempts at writing my own, and I definitely made mess. In the absence of the good, I reckon the simple becomes the standard. In modern BSDs there's a script called init, it gets called at startup and does nothing for you. I reckon we should judge challengers to init against that.
- burke 12y ago
  It's like a modern-day "no true scotsman": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
lucian1900 12y ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
moreentropy 12y ago
I can't access that site because it returns 500 right now, but: Can we please get over it? Quoting the "Unix philosophy" as the reason to keep things like they were 20 years ago is laughable. I want to get things done, and managing processes using init scripts and daemonization is pain. Edit: I'v read the cached version now, and this assumption turned out wrong. The authors see a need to replace sysvinit. The amount of bad and inconsistent init scripts, messy PID file handling, makeshift service wrappers, defective daemonization and logging workarounds is so much worse than having one place that will handle those ever repeated tasks. I love that in recent years Linux (as in distributions) got an attitude and actively push things forward, without losing compatiblity to older software. Apple introduced launchd and nobody complained. We start to rely docker and all sorts of new approaches to manage our services and nobody complains. But init is somehow regarded as the holy cow noone is supposed to touch although everybody agrees it sucks. Even if it's technically wrong: Unix as a platform is now Linux. Everything else is niche products, and we don't have to use the same init mechanism on Linux/BSD/whatever just because we can. I have deployed the same software on Debian Linux, RHEL Linux and AIX and basically had to reimplement service management scripts for every platform to have the best possible result. How could this get even worse?
- txutxu 12y ago
  If you can't access the site, your toughs about it's current content, look like a you're respectfully trying everybody to disrespect this. I'm happy about this movement. In 15 years of sysadmin, I can say that writing init scripts never was a big issue. Maybe for "junior sysadmis" or those that are in the office by their last name. I respect your opinion, but I'm very afraid of the course that linux is taking regarding system design (dbus, systemd, etc) and I resonate with that page content.
  - tmikaeld 12y ago
    I read your answer like this: No newbie sysadmin should touch init scripts because they can't handle it. Isn't it about damn time we go from overly complex to what makes sense? “The only way to control chaos and complexity is to give up some of that control”
mrmondo 12y ago
For Linux to keep evolving, part of evolution is mutation, the strong will flourish while the weak will die. Regardless of what init system is right or wrong, the beauty of the Linux ecosystem is we can afford for different distributions each to make different decisions. Systemd seems functionally better than both sysvinit and upstart and it certainly doesn't seem to be the root of all evil like this article makes out. I don't believe that everyone boycotting systemd over what's currently out there will aid linux in any way.
- clarry 12y ago
  Except that making certain decisions can become prohibitively expensive if it means replacing a behemoth everyone and everything depends on.
- chronid 12y ago
  When everything will use systemd (because all the "core system" is starting to depend on it, wayland included) how do you evolve out of it? Rewrite the entire lower level of your system AGAIN? That does not help evolving rapidly, in my opinion.
  - therealunreal 12y ago
    That's funny. So what you're saying is that we shouldn't rewrite the lower level because it'll be harder to rewrite it later on.
    - chronid 12y ago
      No, and I'm sorry I was not able to explain that properly. :) We should not (re)write a lower level where all the components are so coupled we will be unable to change one of them with a better alternative without changing the rest.
wooptoo 12y ago
> an abhorrent and violent slap in the face to the Unix philosophy I'm tired of all this UNIX philosophy crap. I have been using Systemd for more than a year now, on Archlinux, and it has been a delightful experience. It works out of the box and it gets a lot of things right. Journald is quick & easy to use and a real help in finding problems. No more searching around in log files and grepping. Dependencies between services are handled by the init. Services start with maximum parallelism. Writing .service files is really easy. It simply has better UX than any other init system, and it's supported by a lot of distros. This means standardization and progress. No more developer time wasted on sysvinit scripts. The posted link is the same FUD that I have been reading for the last year on various forums. Even if systemd can be a single point of failure, it's still way more stable than anything we have used before.
- voidz 12y ago
  I'm tired of people who are tired of hearing about UNIX philosophies and call it crap.
Gonzih 12y ago
For me it always feels like people who are bashing on systemd never actually used it. I was very concerned about systemd for long time. And nowadays I use it on all my machines/servers. And it just makes my life so much easier. I'm happy. I like it. I can agree with lot of points on this website. But still systemd makes my happy. So sorry, but no.
- midas007 12y ago
  For 99% of uses, esp desktop, laptop, embedded... it's great. For that tiny percent of use cases where services can do all kinds of crazy things and there needs to be extra control, other things like supervisor, foreman_god, daemontools/runit come into play. There are use-cases not many people have to deal with or even exposed to, yet are important considering the impact (say downing a major service like Gmail).
mrweasel 12y ago
We just install daemontools on all of our servers for our own stuff and let the system packages use whatevers the default in the distro, they seem to live happily together. I suspect that one issue with systemd is that it aims to solve very real problem, but they are problems that not many noticed. Most of the stuff that's highlighted as benefits of systemd are things I never experienced, either I don't thing advanced enough or the issue has already been addressed by the distro. Most of us are just going have some daemon/process that we want to start at boot and for that purpose systemd is going to look like massive overkill and overly complicated. That might be mostly a documentation issue, systemd could benefit for a "So you want to start at process" guide.
blueben 12y ago
<meta name="author" content="VR and DnE"> Seems the authors forgot to give themselves the credit they deserve. https://forums.darknedgy.net/profile.php?id=589 https://forums.darknedgy.net/profile.php?id=589 https://forums.darknedgy.net/profile.php?id=373 https://forums.darknedgy.net/profile.php?id=373 http://billyest.es/About_Me http://billyest.es/About_Me
ef47d35620c1 12y ago
I don't know much about systemd, so I can't say either way. So long as I can still get syslog style plain text logs, then I have no objections. Unix and text log parsing is unparalleled. If simple text log parsing and manipulation is removed (all binary with only xml or json), then I'd be very opposed to systemd.
- coldpie 12y ago
  The short story is systemd's logs are "binary", but they have tools to transform them into whatever plaintext format you like.
fidotron 12y ago
Lennart is rapidly becoming the new Drepper. As long as characters like this persist Linux as a direct end user system is going nowhere, and it will remain a lower level component abstracted away by higher level platforms, as in Android or Chrome OS.
Spittie 12y ago
Okay, I like to think as myself as an open minded individual. I'm not a systemd fanboy either, I just research and use what I believe it's better for myself. There is a reason why I can't consider the anti-systemd guys seriously: It all seems FUD to me. Take for example point 8, "you have to reboot to update systemd. Okay, not really, but the update might go wrong!". Really? Going point by point: 1. As the site says, systemd is both an init system and a collection of programs that make sense to have in a system. One can already strip most of everything from it (I think only journald is mandatory), and there is usually a stable api between every component, so one can simply replace them. In fact, I believe that half of the complains about systemd would disappear if it all the tools were developed in a different repository and not under a "systemd umbrella" (Isn't one of the major point pro-BSD the fact that the base system is all developed together?) 2. If you want to use systemd but have plain-text logs, journald can pass everything to syslog and similar daemons. What everyone forget is the bonus that journald provides: no more "cat /var/log/*.log | grep <program> | sort -u" and hope that applications log in the same format, I have everything in a single place and can browse them by unit, by user, by time, by urgency... 3. I can agree with that. But it's not that sysinitv or upstart worked on non-linux systems (without ugly hacks) 4. And? I'm not sure what's the problem here. udev and dbus are mandatory by pretty much anything that's not a .sh script nowadays. 5. Okay, fair point. "It assumes that users and admins are dumb" can you really blame them? 6. Fair point again, systemd is bigger than sysinitv. But that's almost saying that we should all use microhttpd instead of nginx/apache because it's smaller. Also the simple fact that it's included in RHEL 7 mean that it got audicted by RH, which make me feel safe. 7. That's just FUD. Here's Gnome 3.10 running on OpenBSD: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140219085851 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140219085851 Gnome will depend on systemd when under wayland, that's instead a fact. Actually, on logind, which has an api that anyone can reimplemnt (https://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-logindsystemd-thoughts/ https://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-logind...) 8. Not true, again. Right now, on my system: pgrep -l systemd 1 systemd 354 systemd-journal 386 systemd-udevd 766 systemd-logind 1190 systemd 1754 systemd Also, I still fail to see why "it's big, it will fail" is a thing. What matters is code quality, not size. 9. Fair point. 10. This might or not be possible, I don't have much experience in writing unit files so I don't really know the limits. 11. Nobody is forcing anyone to adopt systemd. It's getting adopted because distributions and developers think it's better. And after months/years of complains about systemd, I still haven't seen anyone trying to produce anything that has the same advantages for sysadmins and programmers. Really, that's how it feels: "I'm going to complain and complain and complain, but I won't lift a finger to change the course of events". Can anyone make a point in favor of sysinitv (or against systemd) without bringing in abstract concept as "Unix philosophy" and plain wrong facts?
peterwwillis 12y ago
tl;dr systemd crashes systems, is incompatible with other distros and OSes, adds admin difficulty, breaks applications, and introduces security holes --- systemd was created in order to improve the speed of booting up your system. I'm serious. It was created because waiting a minute to boot up your machine once was too long. In order to accomplish those faster boot times, they ripped out the stock init system model, and created a monolithic, non-portable, non-backwards-compatible, kernel-version-specific, Noah's Ark of API calls and custom tools which use binary formats and incompatible IPC methods to start programs that were never designed to run that way. They made obsolete virtually every aspect of the operating system which used to work with existing applications to start and maintain the running of userland programs. For faster boot times. Of course, most of you don't care because you don't have to maintain your system, as long as it just works. What does this mean for people who do work with the system? First off, building tools that work with the system are now more complex. It used to be you could use any i/o or ipc method to do anything you wanted. Now you have to look up and call and API call - and if the API call you want isn't in systemd's tool, or it doesn't expose it in a way you can use in your program, tough. Better become a C programmer fast. Second, better be careful how you update your system. Every version of systemd, and any software it depends on, could crash your entire machine if a bug is introduced. I weep for the poor sysadmins who push out an update to thousands of machines only to find a strange bug which takes them all down, all because systemd decided having an enormous codebase was worth booting 20 seconds faster. I hope you've got money for a security audit. systemd has had nine security vulnerabilities in the past four years. For comparison, sysvinit has had one CVE - in 1999. I haven't found any CVEs or security bulletins for upstart, which sounds amazing to me. When it comes time to porting your application to Linux, you don't get to just write it in a way that would normally work on most Unix-like systems (which would, at this point, be virtually every operating system that isn't Windows or Mac OS, and now Linux). Now you have a new porting target specifically just to get your application to run, and then you get to deal with the normal porting issues. At the end of the day, systemd is a culmination of two ideas, with one result. One idea is that a "superior design" with "advanced features" is the only benchmark in which we should design and run a system. The other idea is that we don't need to keep compatibility with legacy systems or alternative platforms, because fuck users, admins, developers, security analysts, distro maintainers and portability teams, we want faster boot times , damnit. And it's Advanced! The result? A big fucking mess of complexity that breaks everything that came before, introduces security holes, makes it more difficult to modify or maintain your system, and breaks compatibility with other systems (even Linux ones). But aside from all that, systemd is great.
silon3 12y ago
Does the old "good standard will have 2 or more implementations" apply here?
ausjke 12y ago
I hate to be personal, the guy leads systemd is indeed a genius, but genius could be more destructive, his way to do things for linux/unix is too intrusive for whatever he has done so far. it's always good to try a disruptive way on the side before it matures and gets accepted gradually, however with the direct support from Redhat(where he is an employee) this systemd thing carries much more power than a typical open source project, sigh. I would rather stay with sysvinit instead of something like this. I think he should be employed at Microsoft to help them revamp their OS or whatever, make it or break it there, but please stay out of OSS.
evbogue 12y ago
If this person had been running systemd, this website would still be up.
binaryapparatus 12y ago
I see this as related and it is less than a month old: http://www.muktware.com/2014/04/linus-torvalds-happy-systemd-author-kay-sievers/25151 http://www.muktware.com/2014/04/linus-torvalds-happy-systemd... https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TheodoreTso/posts/K7ijdmxJ8PF https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TheodoreTso/posts/K7ijdmxJ8PF I am not much of a systemd fan so I may be biased but it is interesting read anyway.
SnakeDoc 12y ago
The Canonical fanboys are just upset they lost out on their inferior technology and now are trying to do everything possible to stall it. systemd is unquestionably a big step forward, Upstart is only a step to the side. There is a reason the serious linux distros (no, Ubuntu is not serious, it's a toy for newbies to use on their desktop) have all chosen systemd. There is also a reason some of them tried Upstart and decided it was not good.
- pekk 12y ago
  No, the Canonical fanboys are following Mark Shuttleworth in accepting systemd as the future for Ubuntu. This is a different set of people.
- caryhartline 12y ago
  Do you really think "Canonical fanboys" would ever suggest Slackware as a distro choice?
dschiptsov 12y ago
There must be already a name for this particular fallacy, when a bunch of people considered themselves "knowing the [only] right direction" and especially "destroying and discarding everything to build it up from scratch as they know will be the best for all". A-la those uneducated, ignorant, but cook-sure and self-confident lower-class revolutionaries in Russia hundred years ago who were unable to grasp that "evolved [social] system" has some subtle "laws , forces and reasons" behind it and that uncomprehensive, even unreadable philosophy or a naive, oversimplified model [of economics] is much worse than no philosophy or model whatsoever. Self-regulated (and especially evolved) complex systems are "smarter" than any bunch of individuals ,)
midas007 12y ago
Until there's a viable alternative, it looks like whining.
SnakeDoc 12y ago
I think the website is missing the legal disclaimer "Paid for by Canonical (because we're bitter)".
- pekk 12y ago
  Again no, Canonical wants to sell services around Ubuntu, which will soon be based on systemd, by decree of Mark Shuttleworth. Wanting to do that, it doesn't make sense that they would shill for Slackware at the top of the page.
lasermike026 12y ago
I hate systemd. I will avoid it when every possible. It is an abomination. I hate upstart even more.
- pekk 12y ago
  Did you read the page? It doesn't advocate upstart.
  - lasermike026 12y ago
    Yes, I did read it. The reason I threw in upstart is because these inits have similar design philosophies.
legulere 12y ago
They single out Lennart Poettering but don't have the guts to write their own names under their arguments. You can't take this serious.
oldmantaiter 12y ago
Considering the adoption and improvements, I'm on board with the "standardization" of distros with systemd. Can't stand upstart and it's "Oh you wanted to restart your daemon, but I won't run the pre-start/post-start/post-stop actions you've configured me to", but that's just me.
bitwize 12y ago
The "debate" about systemd is like the "debate" about global warming: all the people with any knowledge of the issue fall on one side, and the opposition consists largely of the ignorant and butthurt. Systemd has won by being vastly superior to any alternatives. I suppose it's all right to use something else but the community has embraced systemd as the correct solution, and you lose community support and assume all the risk of breakage if you do not stick with systemd.
- Niten 12y ago
  > Systemd has won by being vastly superior to any alternatives. Systemd is better than Upstart, but it won in no small part due to politicking and strategically merging other projects that everyone else depends on.
voidz 12y ago
I fell in love with FreeBSD's init style, which is what I switched to when the move Archlinux made broke my systems. Due to virtualisation demands I had to switch back to Linux, and chose Funtoo (a Gentoo fork) with the OpenRC init system. I've never been happier.
- ciupicri 12y ago
  Isn't FreeBSD's init system monolithic?
duncan_bayne 12y ago
I recently installed and investigated PC-BSD for this very reason; a friend who's a BSD user commented that systemd has been driving BSD adoption very hard recently. I intend switching to PC-BSD for personal and work use within the year.

258 points by martinp 12y ago

Just pointing out it's not that difficult to "roll your own" linux distro. It'll take you an afternoon if you haven't done it before... and you can very well choose to keep using sysvinit if you want (my personal distro will use sysvinit probably until the end of the year when I have time to figure out how to integrate systemd).

mordae 12y ago

> Contribute to and use distros like Slackware and CRUX that follow traditional Unix paradigms. Made my day. Emphasis mine.

josteink 12y ago
The good thing about Slackware is that it acts as a timemachine for how Unix/Linux used to be back in the mid-90s. When the neckbeards comes around complaining about "Unix philosophy" you can always tell them to use Slackware. And then watch them go silent.

_pmf_ 12y ago

At https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_init_systems https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_init_systems all of the features that are unique to systemd are immediately something that I'd rather not have integrated.

adimania 12y ago

It is Linux. Let systemd live and if you don't like it, switch to upstart. No one is stopping you.

lmedinas 12y ago
Actually it's not like this. On FOSS when there is no manpower distros need to make a choice: supporting the software themselves or pick the maintained solution. So when upstart developed slowed down, by other words Canonical pulled resources from it, it was when they made the decision to switch to systemd. Also the cost of maintain it and adapt applications who are tied to systemd is much more larger than adopting syetemd. The only viable solution i'm seeing right now is: Use a mainstream distro with systemd or switch to other one which maintains their own init system like Slackware or Gentoo.
chronid 12y ago
It's (slowly) becoming impossible.
- pekk 12y ago
  This is the "TempleOS impulse". The feeling of disgust with byzantine complexity, driving an impulse to start clean and chase the money changers out of the temple
  - voidz 12y ago
    Upvoted for mentioning TempleOS, I have never been more frightened when reading about OSs.

mateuszf 12y ago

Em .. no, thank you. I think that systemd is a good step in the direction of unifying different distributions. Also, many argument presented on that page have been debunked or are actually good things.

tmikaeld 12y ago
I agree, i find it very hard to believe that so many distos would make the wrong choice here.
- Fuxy 12y ago
  It's the best option at the moment arguably not perfect but better then anything else out there. I wish the owner of that website would would make a better alternative instead of complaining.
  - kourt 12y ago
    I think the concern is that systemd is following a rapid "embrace, extend, extinguish" path, and very quickly will have achieved critical mass and become somewhat unstoppable. There's nothing wrong with saying "I like Linux, but it's becoming Lennartix and I'm concerned."
- makomk 12y ago
  They made the only choice. Because various applications are now dependent on systemd APIs in order to function correctly, and those APIs in turn can only be implemented by an init system that is structured the same way as systemd, it's essentially impossible to use anything else. Someone could come up with an alternative to systemd that was superior in every other way and it'd be impossible to move to it. (Hell, it'd have been impossible to move to systemd in the first place if the existing init system was so closely entwined with everything else.)
cheery 12y ago
Are you kidding? Already the reason 1. is crippling Linux and what it stands for. All points combined mean that if you include this in distribution, that distribution will stagnate and die.

blueskin_ 12y ago

I'd rather see init's problems fixed (i.e. start services in parallel), but systemd is far better than upstart (edit: got it to load at last, I see it's not by upstart fans, so ignore that last part). That said, a lot of systemd seems like a really stupid idea to me, e.g. binary logs, the massively increased SPOF size, and the "do everything" mentality. Unfortunately, I don't know of any distros that aren't using it now (edit: I didn't even realise Slackware was still a thing...), and upstart is even more of a joke than systemd.

crashandburn4 12y ago
I've got to agree with a lot of your points here, to paraphrase churchill, systemd is the worst system management daemon system that we have, except for all those other ones that have been tried from time to time. (this sounds a little harsh to the other ones, but I find systemd intuitive from a user-facing perspective even if it does have a lot of inelegance under the hood) [0] http://wais.stanford.edu/Democracy/democracy_DemocracyAndChurchill(090503).html http://wais.stanford.edu/Democracy/democracy_DemocracyAndChu...
quasque 12y ago
What's wrong with binary logs? Seems like an improvement, given how they can be cryptographically 'sealed' to help tamper detection, and have indexes built in [1]. [1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-files/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-fil...
- icebraining 12y ago
  Sealing sounds interesting, but that page doesn't explain why can't plain-text logs be sealed.
- mrweasel 12y ago
  Binary logs are pretty annoying because your standard tools for searching through them no longer works. tail, less, grep, wc and similar tools are rendered useless. Newer tools like logstash or Splunk are also going to have issues reading your binary logs. It's not really a wise thing to break the tools that most people use every day, it's just going to make them hate you.

andrelaszlo 12y ago

Tom Gundersen discussed the move to systemd on the Arch Linux forums a couple of years ago. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530 Summary: 0) it is hotplug capable 1) we can know the state of the system 2) it is modular 3) it allows dbus/udev to go back to doing the task they are meant to do 4) we can reduce the number of explicit ordering dependencies between daemons 5) we get a lot of security/sandboxing features for free 6) systemd service files can be written and distributed upstream 7) systemd is a cross-distro project 8) logind will finally deliver on what consolekit was supposed to do 9) systemd is fast

antocv 12y ago
DMD has all those advantages as well. Dmd is the gnu daemon managing daemons.
- davexunit 12y ago
  I'm very excited about dmd. It's being developed in conjunction with the Guix project for an official GNU distribution. I hope to soon steer clear of this systemd mess by using a Guix system running dmd.
  - antocv 12y ago
    Yeah me too, and we can help, get on the guix-devel list and try to follow, learn guile/scheme and such. Im planning at least to provide more documentation, when I learn guix and dmd more.
    - davexunit 12y ago
      I'm a Guix contributor. Haven't hacked on dmd yet, though.
      - antocv 12y ago
        Youre doing awesome work!

ealexhudson 12y ago

'systemd flies in the face of the Unix philosophy: "do one thing and do it well," representing a complex collection of dozens of binaries' So, a collection of lots of single-purpose binaries that work together flies in the face of "do one thing and do it well". I kinda stopped reading at this point, which was sadly quite high up the page.

TTPrograms 12y ago
I think the point is you can't replace each of those binaries with alternatives. The monolithic nature of systemd is not just a function of the raw number of binaries involved.
- zokier 12y ago
  > I think the point is you can't replace each of those binaries with alternatives Is there any reason why you couldn't do so? Found this chart: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePortabilityAndStabilityChart/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePo... Note the columns "Reimplementable Independently" and "Known Other Implementations"
  - makomk 12y ago
    Those are the external APIs that the various parts of systemd expose to non-systemd applications, the internal APIs are not documented and are subject to change. Basically, you can't just replace part of systemd, you need to write replacements for the whole thing that reimplement all the same APIs in ways that are compatible with it because stuff like Gnome now relies on them. That's part of the reason why Ubuntu gave up and switched to systemd - a lot of the desktop stuff they shipped relies on logind etc upstream, and it just wouldn't be practical for them to implement their own versions of everything that got Borged by systemd. (Edit: in fact, that page lists logind as something that cannot be independently reimplemented or used separately from systemd.)
  - cthalupa 12y ago
    Something being (theoretically) possible doesn't mean it's practical. The attitude of the systemd (And Freedesktop.org folks in general - and please don't give us the usual Lennart cry of "No really, we're NOT the freedesktop.org people!" - despite all of these projects sharing a tightly knit community of people steering them) devs and their treatment of their projects has meant for some you basically do things their way or the highway.[1] It's already a pain in the ass to strip udev out to keep using it if you've decided to not use systemd. And that's just taking one portion of the system that was promised to be kept easily independent of the rest of the muck, not trying to make other services work within the framework of a systemd system. As it becomes the standard across all of the major distros, I find it hard to believe that it will become easier to separate systemd parts from one another than it is now, because there becomes even less incentive to do so. I don't have much of a horse in this race, because I've long since migrated the vast majority of my production systems to FreeBSD and OmniOS, and out of the few that I have that are running linux still, some of them are using systemd. I don't particularly like it, but instead of complaining about it and doing nothing, I've minimized the impact I feel from it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7534583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7534583

nifoc 12y ago

> Consider migrating to BSD, Plan 9 or something similar, if things get really out of hand. I can understand suggesting to migrate to BSD, but Plan 9? Seriously? And what's the purpose of the "Open Source Tea Party" picture? This surely is not the only picture of Lennart in existence.

foxylad 12y ago

Given that both systemd and upstart exist, it would seem that it is time for a next generation init. And given that Ubuntu has now accepted systemd, it has critical mass and should be the new standard. "Doing one thing and doing it well" is a fine guide for system tools, but does not apply to everything - look at the kernel, or Gnome for instance.

Grue3 12y ago

I'm getting code 500 error, but I'm guessing a Republican has been discovered to be somehow related to systemd.

klaasvakie 12y ago

Does anyone know if this quote is true?: "Since systemd is very tightly welded with the Linux kernel API, this also makes different systemd versions incompatible with different kernel versions." I was pretty meh about the whole systemd thing, but having to change userspace when swopping out kernels is a spectacular disadvantage. Imagine having to downgrade your distro whenever you need to test against older kernels --- madness. This is especially bad with ARM/embedded stuff where one often runs a modern userspace with an older kernel.

cnvogel 12y ago
In my experiece, upgrading the kernel to a newer one is not a problem. What can happen, though, is that an upgrade of userspace will suddenly require a kernel-feature not present, if you run an ancient board-support-package with a 3.0-kernel or so in 2014! (happened to me with a BSP for a Freescale i.MX6). So, if you have archlinux tracking the latest and greatest systemd, uptrading userland can make your machine no longer bring up everything (completely). But in my case the kernel is from 2011...
- klaasvakie 12y ago
  I have an i.MX5 BSP with a 2.6.xx era kernel :( Can you give an example of the "no longer bring up everything (completely)"?
  - cnvogel 12y ago
    After putting a current arch-linux rootfs[1] on the box[2], it seems to come up, just network and console seems to be misconfigured, but this, I think, I had to fix the last time also. So: indeed the current systemd seems to work on a iMX6 running a 3.0 kernel. [1] ArchLinuxARM-imx6-latest.tar.gz from http://archlinuxarm.org/developers/downloads http://archlinuxarm.org/developers/downloads [2] Phytec PhyFlex i.MX6 http://www.phytec.de/de/produkte/system-on-modules/produktdetails/p/phyflex-imx-6-3.html http://www.phytec.de/de/produkte/system-on-modules/produktde...
    - 12y ago

vidarh 12y ago

They'd get much further if they actually came up with a better alternative. Even if all of there points were objectively true, it doesn't matter when sticking with the old init is so much worse in many ways. People aren't picking systemd because it's perfect, but because both the mess of init scripts it is replacing, and alternatives like upstart,is seen as worse/too lacking. EDIT: Btw. this just got me to install systemd on one of our dev/test Debian boxes at work, to start testing it.

theanirudh 12y ago

The author of systemd, Lennart Poettering busts some systemd myths in his blog post http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

barkingcat 12y ago
it sounds like a lot of the complaints were of the "this makes things easier and smells like it's not the lovechild borne of any arcane hacker and I refuse to read documentation" variety.
espadrine 12y ago
There's one thing that the boycott post gets right, that Mr Poettering doesn't address, which is: > 2. systemd's journal files (handled by journald) are stored in a complicated binary format. Mr Poettering tackles the myth that configuration files are binary (they are very obviously not). That said, I am not sure how to get the journaling data in an Upstart system, nor in a sysvinit one.
cakeface 12y ago
Also, I highly recommend reading Lennart Poettering's initial description of systemd on his blog [1]. It lays out the paradigms behind systemd design really well. I think that it is important to understand the problems that systemd is trying to solve in order to evaluate whether it is doing it's job well. [1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

lmedinas 12y ago

Systemd got a huge boost due the involved from Red Hat. But then most of the distros are adopting it, even Debian and Ubuntu. I don't see a reason but still if you want to stay out of systemd better use Gentoo or other "non" major distro.

mateuszf 12y ago
The reason is that it's awesome.

lvillani 12y ago

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zylqvGo21_oJ:boycottsystemd.org/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zylqvGo... (the site is unreachable at the moment).

nemasu 12y ago

Okay, well, while I agree with most of the points they make, there just isn't a viable alternative. I maintain noop Linux (nooplinux.org), it started using OpenRC, but when udev was merged into systemd, things got very complicated, eventually the switch was made. Systemd is very fast, the 'init.d' scripts are way better, udev work very well...I don't mind thinking about moving back away from systemd (because I really do have a love-hate relationship with it), but what am I supposed to go back to? OpenRC/SysV-whatever? Heck no. Upstart? Nope. ...is there even an alternative that makes sense? Because moving back to SysV would be a step back.

stefantalpalaru 12y ago
>it started using OpenRC, but when udev was merged into systemd, things got very complicated I got past that by using eudev with OpenRC on Gentoo.
- jbergstroem 12y ago
  For uncomplicated systems (such as virtual machines, servers and whatnot) there's mdev in busybox.

SEMW 12y ago

"Unix philosophy" seems to be one of those phrases that everyone likes agreeing with because you can use it to either justify or condemn anything you like. E.g. you could perfectly plausibly make the argument that systemd's return to inetd-style service starting (on-demand and in-parallel through socket activation) is a lot more unix-philosophy-like than the SysVinit way.

cturner 12y ago
Agree, but SysV-init isn't notably unixy. In general, SysV distros raced to embrace and extend away from the mainstream. That created lots of un-unixy subsystems that live on in linux. Quick wave in the direction of three - NFS, wacky IPC systems, SysVinit. SysVinit is complicated - it wants to be a DSL but is still a shell hack-together. It's inflexible - it's a dependency tracking system, but you can't easily adapt it for userspace launch control, or as a build tool. It doesn't do one thing well. (e.g. doesn't reliably contain a process tree, there are still situations where you want to use pid files or complicated ps greps). Init is a hard problem. From what I can see all the unix derivatives have made a mess of it. I've had fleeting attempts at writing my own, and I definitely made mess. In the absence of the good, I reckon the simple becomes the standard. In modern BSDs there's a script called init, it gets called at startup and does nothing for you. I reckon we should judge challengers to init against that.
burke 12y ago
It's like a modern-day "no true scotsman": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

lucian1900 12y ago

This is why we can't have nice things.

moreentropy 12y ago

I can't access that site because it returns 500 right now, but: Can we please get over it? Quoting the "Unix philosophy" as the reason to keep things like they were 20 years ago is laughable. I want to get things done, and managing processes using init scripts and daemonization is pain. Edit: I'v read the cached version now, and this assumption turned out wrong. The authors see a need to replace sysvinit. The amount of bad and inconsistent init scripts, messy PID file handling, makeshift service wrappers, defective daemonization and logging workarounds is so much worse than having one place that will handle those ever repeated tasks. I love that in recent years Linux (as in distributions) got an attitude and actively push things forward, without losing compatiblity to older software. Apple introduced launchd and nobody complained. We start to rely docker and all sorts of new approaches to manage our services and nobody complains. But init is somehow regarded as the holy cow noone is supposed to touch although everybody agrees it sucks. Even if it's technically wrong: Unix as a platform is now Linux. Everything else is niche products, and we don't have to use the same init mechanism on Linux/BSD/whatever just because we can. I have deployed the same software on Debian Linux, RHEL Linux and AIX and basically had to reimplement service management scripts for every platform to have the best possible result. How could this get even worse?

txutxu 12y ago
If you can't access the site, your toughs about it's current content, look like a you're respectfully trying everybody to disrespect this. I'm happy about this movement. In 15 years of sysadmin, I can say that writing init scripts never was a big issue. Maybe for "junior sysadmis" or those that are in the office by their last name. I respect your opinion, but I'm very afraid of the course that linux is taking regarding system design (dbus, systemd, etc) and I resonate with that page content.
- tmikaeld 12y ago
  I read your answer like this: No newbie sysadmin should touch init scripts because they can't handle it. Isn't it about damn time we go from overly complex to what makes sense? “The only way to control chaos and complexity is to give up some of that control”

mrmondo 12y ago

For Linux to keep evolving, part of evolution is mutation, the strong will flourish while the weak will die. Regardless of what init system is right or wrong, the beauty of the Linux ecosystem is we can afford for different distributions each to make different decisions. Systemd seems functionally better than both sysvinit and upstart and it certainly doesn't seem to be the root of all evil like this article makes out. I don't believe that everyone boycotting systemd over what's currently out there will aid linux in any way.

clarry 12y ago
Except that making certain decisions can become prohibitively expensive if it means replacing a behemoth everyone and everything depends on.
chronid 12y ago
When everything will use systemd (because all the "core system" is starting to depend on it, wayland included) how do you evolve out of it? Rewrite the entire lower level of your system AGAIN? That does not help evolving rapidly, in my opinion.
- therealunreal 12y ago
  That's funny. So what you're saying is that we shouldn't rewrite the lower level because it'll be harder to rewrite it later on.
  - chronid 12y ago
    No, and I'm sorry I was not able to explain that properly. :) We should not (re)write a lower level where all the components are so coupled we will be unable to change one of them with a better alternative without changing the rest.

wooptoo 12y ago

> an abhorrent and violent slap in the face to the Unix philosophy I'm tired of all this UNIX philosophy crap. I have been using Systemd for more than a year now, on Archlinux, and it has been a delightful experience. It works out of the box and it gets a lot of things right. Journald is quick & easy to use and a real help in finding problems. No more searching around in log files and grepping. Dependencies between services are handled by the init. Services start with maximum parallelism. Writing .service files is really easy. It simply has better UX than any other init system, and it's supported by a lot of distros. This means standardization and progress. No more developer time wasted on sysvinit scripts. The posted link is the same FUD that I have been reading for the last year on various forums. Even if systemd can be a single point of failure, it's still way more stable than anything we have used before.

voidz 12y ago
I'm tired of people who are tired of hearing about UNIX philosophies and call it crap.

Gonzih 12y ago

For me it always feels like people who are bashing on systemd never actually used it. I was very concerned about systemd for long time. And nowadays I use it on all my machines/servers. And it just makes my life so much easier. I'm happy. I like it. I can agree with lot of points on this website. But still systemd makes my happy. So sorry, but no.

midas007 12y ago
For 99% of uses, esp desktop, laptop, embedded... it's great. For that tiny percent of use cases where services can do all kinds of crazy things and there needs to be extra control, other things like supervisor, foreman_god, daemontools/runit come into play. There are use-cases not many people have to deal with or even exposed to, yet are important considering the impact (say downing a major service like Gmail).

mrweasel 12y ago

We just install daemontools on all of our servers for our own stuff and let the system packages use whatevers the default in the distro, they seem to live happily together. I suspect that one issue with systemd is that it aims to solve very real problem, but they are problems that not many noticed. Most of the stuff that's highlighted as benefits of systemd are things I never experienced, either I don't thing advanced enough or the issue has already been addressed by the distro. Most of us are just going have some daemon/process that we want to start at boot and for that purpose systemd is going to look like massive overkill and overly complicated. That might be mostly a documentation issue, systemd could benefit for a "So you want to start at process" guide.

blueben 12y ago

ef47d35620c1 12y ago

I don't know much about systemd, so I can't say either way. So long as I can still get syslog style plain text logs, then I have no objections. Unix and text log parsing is unparalleled. If simple text log parsing and manipulation is removed (all binary with only xml or json), then I'd be very opposed to systemd.

coldpie 12y ago
The short story is systemd's logs are "binary", but they have tools to transform them into whatever plaintext format you like.

fidotron 12y ago

Lennart is rapidly becoming the new Drepper. As long as characters like this persist Linux as a direct end user system is going nowhere, and it will remain a lower level component abstracted away by higher level platforms, as in Android or Chrome OS.

Spittie 12y ago

Okay, I like to think as myself as an open minded individual. I'm not a systemd fanboy either, I just research and use what I believe it's better for myself. There is a reason why I can't consider the anti-systemd guys seriously: It all seems FUD to me. Take for example point 8, "you have to reboot to update systemd. Okay, not really, but the update might go wrong!". Really? Going point by point: 1. As the site says, systemd is both an init system and a collection of programs that make sense to have in a system. One can already strip most of everything from it (I think only journald is mandatory), and there is usually a stable api between every component, so one can simply replace them. In fact, I believe that half of the complains about systemd would disappear if it all the tools were developed in a different repository and not under a "systemd umbrella" (Isn't one of the major point pro-BSD the fact that the base system is all developed together?) 2. If you want to use systemd but have plain-text logs, journald can pass everything to syslog and similar daemons. What everyone forget is the bonus that journald provides: no more "cat /var/log/*.log | grep <program> | sort -u" and hope that applications log in the same format, I have everything in a single place and can browse them by unit, by user, by time, by urgency... 3. I can agree with that. But it's not that sysinitv or upstart worked on non-linux systems (without ugly hacks) 4. And? I'm not sure what's the problem here. udev and dbus are mandatory by pretty much anything that's not a .sh script nowadays. 5. Okay, fair point. "It assumes that users and admins are dumb" can you really blame them? 6. Fair point again, systemd is bigger than sysinitv. But that's almost saying that we should all use microhttpd instead of nginx/apache because it's smaller. Also the simple fact that it's included in RHEL 7 mean that it got audicted by RH, which make me feel safe. 7. That's just FUD. Here's Gnome 3.10 running on OpenBSD: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140219085851 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140219085851 Gnome will depend on systemd when under wayland, that's instead a fact. Actually, on logind, which has an api that anyone can reimplemnt (https://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-logindsystemd-thoughts/ https://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-logind...) 8. Not true, again. Right now, on my system: pgrep -l systemd 1 systemd 354 systemd-journal 386 systemd-udevd 766 systemd-logind 1190 systemd 1754 systemd Also, I still fail to see why "it's big, it will fail" is a thing. What matters is code quality, not size. 9. Fair point. 10. This might or not be possible, I don't have much experience in writing unit files so I don't really know the limits. 11. Nobody is forcing anyone to adopt systemd. It's getting adopted because distributions and developers think it's better. And after months/years of complains about systemd, I still haven't seen anyone trying to produce anything that has the same advantages for sysadmins and programmers. Really, that's how it feels: "I'm going to complain and complain and complain, but I won't lift a finger to change the course of events". Can anyone make a point in favor of sysinitv (or against systemd) without bringing in abstract concept as "Unix philosophy" and plain wrong facts?

peterwwillis 12y ago

tl;dr systemd crashes systems, is incompatible with other distros and OSes, adds admin difficulty, breaks applications, and introduces security holes --- systemd was created in order to improve the speed of booting up your system. I'm serious. It was created because waiting a minute to boot up your machine once was too long. In order to accomplish those faster boot times, they ripped out the stock init system model, and created a monolithic, non-portable, non-backwards-compatible, kernel-version-specific, Noah's Ark of API calls and custom tools which use binary formats and incompatible IPC methods to start programs that were never designed to run that way. They made obsolete virtually every aspect of the operating system which used to work with existing applications to start and maintain the running of userland programs. For faster boot times. Of course, most of you don't care because you don't have to maintain your system, as long as it just works. What does this mean for people who do work with the system? First off, building tools that work with the system are now more complex. It used to be you could use any i/o or ipc method to do anything you wanted. Now you have to look up and call and API call - and if the API call you want isn't in systemd's tool, or it doesn't expose it in a way you can use in your program, tough. Better become a C programmer fast. Second, better be careful how you update your system. Every version of systemd, and any software it depends on, could crash your entire machine if a bug is introduced. I weep for the poor sysadmins who push out an update to thousands of machines only to find a strange bug which takes them all down, all because systemd decided having an enormous codebase was worth booting 20 seconds faster. I hope you've got money for a security audit. systemd has had nine security vulnerabilities in the past four years. For comparison, sysvinit has had one CVE - in 1999. I haven't found any CVEs or security bulletins for upstart, which sounds amazing to me. When it comes time to porting your application to Linux, you don't get to just write it in a way that would normally work on most Unix-like systems (which would, at this point, be virtually every operating system that isn't Windows or Mac OS, and now Linux). Now you have a new porting target specifically just to get your application to run, and then you get to deal with the normal porting issues. At the end of the day, systemd is a culmination of two ideas, with one result. One idea is that a "superior design" with "advanced features" is the only benchmark in which we should design and run a system. The other idea is that we don't need to keep compatibility with legacy systems or alternative platforms, because fuck users, admins, developers, security analysts, distro maintainers and portability teams, we want faster boot times , damnit. And it's Advanced! The result? A big fucking mess of complexity that breaks everything that came before, introduces security holes, makes it more difficult to modify or maintain your system, and breaks compatibility with other systems (even Linux ones). But aside from all that, systemd is great.

silon3 12y ago

Does the old "good standard will have 2 or more implementations" apply here?

ausjke 12y ago

I hate to be personal, the guy leads systemd is indeed a genius, but genius could be more destructive, his way to do things for linux/unix is too intrusive for whatever he has done so far. it's always good to try a disruptive way on the side before it matures and gets accepted gradually, however with the direct support from Redhat(where he is an employee) this systemd thing carries much more power than a typical open source project, sigh. I would rather stay with sysvinit instead of something like this. I think he should be employed at Microsoft to help them revamp their OS or whatever, make it or break it there, but please stay out of OSS.

evbogue 12y ago

If this person had been running systemd, this website would still be up.

binaryapparatus 12y ago

I see this as related and it is less than a month old: http://www.muktware.com/2014/04/linus-torvalds-happy-systemd-author-kay-sievers/25151 http://www.muktware.com/2014/04/linus-torvalds-happy-systemd... https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TheodoreTso/posts/K7ijdmxJ8PF https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TheodoreTso/posts/K7ijdmxJ8PF I am not much of a systemd fan so I may be biased but it is interesting read anyway.

SnakeDoc 12y ago

The Canonical fanboys are just upset they lost out on their inferior technology and now are trying to do everything possible to stall it. systemd is unquestionably a big step forward, Upstart is only a step to the side. There is a reason the serious linux distros (no, Ubuntu is not serious, it's a toy for newbies to use on their desktop) have all chosen systemd. There is also a reason some of them tried Upstart and decided it was not good.

pekk 12y ago
No, the Canonical fanboys are following Mark Shuttleworth in accepting systemd as the future for Ubuntu. This is a different set of people.
caryhartline 12y ago
Do you really think "Canonical fanboys" would ever suggest Slackware as a distro choice?

dschiptsov 12y ago

There must be already a name for this particular fallacy, when a bunch of people considered themselves "knowing the [only] right direction" and especially "destroying and discarding everything to build it up from scratch as they know will be the best for all". A-la those uneducated, ignorant, but cook-sure and self-confident lower-class revolutionaries in Russia hundred years ago who were unable to grasp that "evolved [social] system" has some subtle "laws , forces and reasons" behind it and that uncomprehensive, even unreadable philosophy or a naive, oversimplified model [of economics] is much worse than no philosophy or model whatsoever. Self-regulated (and especially evolved) complex systems are "smarter" than any bunch of individuals ,)

midas007 12y ago

Until there's a viable alternative, it looks like whining.

SnakeDoc 12y ago

I think the website is missing the legal disclaimer "Paid for by Canonical (because we're bitter)".

pekk 12y ago
Again no, Canonical wants to sell services around Ubuntu, which will soon be based on systemd, by decree of Mark Shuttleworth. Wanting to do that, it doesn't make sense that they would shill for Slackware at the top of the page.

lasermike026 12y ago

I hate systemd. I will avoid it when every possible. It is an abomination. I hate upstart even more.

pekk 12y ago
Did you read the page? It doesn't advocate upstart.
- lasermike026 12y ago
  Yes, I did read it. The reason I threw in upstart is because these inits have similar design philosophies.

legulere 12y ago

They single out Lennart Poettering but don't have the guts to write their own names under their arguments. You can't take this serious.

oldmantaiter 12y ago

Considering the adoption and improvements, I'm on board with the "standardization" of distros with systemd. Can't stand upstart and it's "Oh you wanted to restart your daemon, but I won't run the pre-start/post-start/post-stop actions you've configured me to", but that's just me.

bitwize 12y ago

The "debate" about systemd is like the "debate" about global warming: all the people with any knowledge of the issue fall on one side, and the opposition consists largely of the ignorant and butthurt. Systemd has won by being vastly superior to any alternatives. I suppose it's all right to use something else but the community has embraced systemd as the correct solution, and you lose community support and assume all the risk of breakage if you do not stick with systemd.

Niten 12y ago
> Systemd has won by being vastly superior to any alternatives. Systemd is better than Upstart, but it won in no small part due to politicking and strategically merging other projects that everyone else depends on.

voidz 12y ago

I fell in love with FreeBSD's init style, which is what I switched to when the move Archlinux made broke my systems. Due to virtualisation demands I had to switch back to Linux, and chose Funtoo (a Gentoo fork) with the OpenRC init system. I've never been happier.

ciupicri 12y ago
Isn't FreeBSD's init system monolithic?

duncan_bayne 12y ago

I recently installed and investigated PC-BSD for this very reason; a friend who's a BSD user commented that systemd has been driving BSD adoption very hard recently. I intend switching to PC-BSD for personal and work use within the year.