6 ms·
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. Th
by 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?
- meapix 12y ago6. is a big deal for me. 9 CVE since 2011? that's crazy in combination of "single point of failure".
- exelius 12y agoYeah, but keep in mind that: 1. It now has a lot more attention focused on it, so it will get more scrutiny. 2. Unix admins have always been wary of the bleeding edge; distros are adopting systemd today, but those distros themselves are unlikely to see wide production adoption for a year or two. 3. If the systemd team's processes are not up to snuff, a major distro will fork it and run it themselves. If the criticisms have any merit, others will follow. It's why open source is such a great model for critical system software: it's as pure of a meritocratic model as you can get (well, if you accept the fact that merit is based on adoption.) Basically, any new critical unix process is going to have these types of issues. The fact that systemd has a lot of support basically ensures it will get a lot of attention and bugs/security holes will be fixed.
- mwcampbell 12y agoStill, the simpler something is, the less scrutiny it needs in the first place. Mind you, I think even sysvinit is too complex for PID 1. PID 1 should do the bare minimum trhat the kernel expects of it (taking care of orphaned processes, handling shutdown requests) and leave the rest to other programs.
- exelius 12y agoOn some level I agree with you, but if you look at the things that Apple is able to do with OS X and timer coalescing [1], that central point of coordination becomes critical. You need a mechanism for starting and stopping all things, not just daemons, that plays by a specific, defined set of rules so you don't have multiple processes trying to do the same thing. On another level, I feel the "unix philosophy" of having a lot of interchangeable modules taking care of small, simple tasks hurt it: each level of abstraction has a performance hit, and having to support multiple components in a modular way makes change management a nightmare. There's something to be said for the elegance of tightly integrated components: you can make assumptions that you couldn't otherwise make in a more modular system. I can see how it would be a problem if systemd were proprietary, but it's open source. [1] http://www.apple.com/osx/advanced-technologies/ http://www.apple.com/osx/advanced-technologies/