6 ms·

This. The FreeBSD rc system just works, is well documented and is small enough to understand by one person without too much effort.

aerique 12y ago
Are there reasons why Linux couldn't just adopt it?
- Andys 12y ago
  There's nothing stopping a Linux distro doing this.... but It would be a step backwards: it is simpler, and does less stuff, so booting would be slower and some features are missing.
  - rjsw 12y ago
    Why would booting be slower ? My BSD systems boot quickly enough for me.
    - chousuke 12y ago
      My FreeBSD system has a 30-second timeout during which the entire boot process is halted because it waits for a default route to the internet... which it won't get, because I haven't configured one. It's pretty dumb, and not enough of a problem for me that I'd figure out how to work around it, but it's a pretty good example.
      - ash 12y ago
        I don't think this 30-second timeout is a bug in FreeBSD or in rc. You may want your server to wait for the network to become available. Ubuntu Server has the same "waiting for network" timeout: http://askubuntu.com/questions/63456/waiting-for-network-configuration-adding-3-to-5-minutes-to-boot-time http://askubuntu.com/questions/63456/waiting-for-network-con...
        vidarh 12y ago
        But the only reason this is necessary is when the boot system isn't smart enough to start whatever can safely be started through proper dependencies. My experience is that a substantial amount of time is wasted weeding out undesired timeouts in startup scripts, because they lead to increasing downtime.
      - allegory 12y ago
        Just set in rc.conf: defaultrouter="NO" It shouldn't hang.
  - allegory 12y ago
    How often do you reboot your kit? Boot time is such a stupid metric even on laptops and stuff where you just suspend/hibernate. My BSD systems (not front-facing and therefore on a lesser patch cycle) rarely get rebooted and neither do the processes so this is indeed moot for me. Proof: http://i.imgur.com/tZsM82Q.png http://i.imgur.com/tZsM82Q.png Yes that's a memcached uptime on a host that has had 10,185,367,932 cache hits...
    - _delirium 12y ago
      Suspend/hibernate on free unixes is a nightmare of incomplete support and buggy drivers, so not much of a solution. I'm don't know a single person who has a working laptop suspend/resume setup on FreeBSD (though it's theoretically possible), and it's not usually recommended to rely on it even if you could get it working. Linux has somewhat more complete support, but it's still very hit or miss, and it's common for stuff to be wonky after a resume, even when it does work.
      - allegory 12y ago
        I'll give you that to a degree. It does suck on FreeBSD with my X201. Nothing works but I'm being cheeky now and running it in VirtualBox on top of windows (which I need for other work). OpenBSD however works wonderfully.
  - edwintorok 12y ago
    The main question is would it work? For me systemd or applications starting to support systemd only break things (something wrong with policykit/consolekit for example with sysvinit+systemd-shim) that used to work. Also there are some peculiarities in the way the LSB init script compatibility is implemented in systemd: it tries to be 'smart' and remember their state. So you start an init script, and it failed for some reason / perhaps even exited with an error code, perhaps you are still developing that init script. Now fixing the problem and running the init script / systemctl start doesn't even try to run the script because it thinks it has run it yet. You first have to tell it to stop it (which fails), and only then you can run it again.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Feel free. Most people won't, as systemd solves very real problems that people care a great deal about, whether or not you like the way it has solved them.
  - bigbugbag 12y ago
    15 years linux user here, systemd is pushing me hard towards leaving linux. Please tell me what very real problems people care a great dead bout systemd solved by turning log files from text to binary. Also I care about being able to use my computer and for the first in 15 years a systemd update caused my computer to needlessly dropping into systemd emergency mode at boot and this emergency mode being broken I was effectively locked out of my computer because an optional external usb drive that was defined in fstab with no issue for a couple years now required a nofail option. Now consider that this computer is located in a remote location 1000 km away from where I live. To me systemd already caused way more very real problems I do care a great deal about than it has solved reducing boot time by a few seconds is not something I care that much about.
    - allegory 12y ago
      For me Linux is pretty dead already because I can't entirely trust the direct it's going in having survived the Unix wars of the 1990s. There are so many parallels to that at the moment, it's not funny. There are large vendors pulling it in separate directions (Canonical, Redhat, Google). At the end of the day, much like back then, customers will suffer from terrible support, fragmentation and political battles. I just want to get shit done and solve problems and anything that risks that gets outed now. FreeBSD hits the sweet spot, probably followed by NetBSD.
      - cwyers 12y ago
        "There are large vendors pulling it in separate directions (Canonical, Redhat, Google)." It's pretty clear how that's going to shake out, isn't it? Google is pretty much a non-issue here; yes, Android and ChromeOS use a Linux kernel base, but they have no impact on any mainline distros, and there's no indication Google wants them to. So it reduces down to two parties fighting for control: Canonical and Red Hat. And Red Hat is going to win. Canonical doesn't have the resources to go its own way on more than a handful of fronts (this is why when Debian switched to systemd Upstart was killed off; Canonical is far too reliant on Debian as an upstream to fight every issue), and their requirement for a CLA to accept anyone else's code means they are entirely reliant on their own coders, as nobody wants to sign Canonical's CLAs. We'll see how long they can stick it out on Mir, but they don't have the resources to fight a war with Red Hat on two fronts, so that's the only issue I expect to see them fighting over.
- jamesog 12y ago
  Slackware uses exactly this system.
_delirium 12y ago
As an init system it works fine, but you do end up having to find or invent a bunch of additional stuff if you want similar functionality to what's driving some of the systemd use-cases. The result might still be better (I haven't done a detailed architectural comparison), but you do need something. For example one of the things I find useful about the "systemd way" of things is that it provides, finally, a story about how to apply cgroups to services in a sane way. The kernel provides the APIs, but actually using them from userspace was not fun previously, with multiple incompatible systems, largely based on tangles of shell scripts that had broken corner cases. With FreeBSD, my impression is that manual shell scripting is still the norm. Integrating RCTL (FreeBSD's resource-limiting facility) with service management basically consists of manually writing in a bunch of imperative calls to RCTL into scripts. There's no way to configure services with limits declaratively, ensure the right thing happens when services are started/stopped, etc., precisely because there's no integration between the RCTL facility and the process-management or init facilities. Or at least I haven't found a way. The closest is that if you need such integration only for jails, you do have the option of third-party "monolithic" management systems, such as CBSD.
- allegory 12y ago
  RCTL is a stateful database. It's not there yet, but the right solution for managing this declaratively as with anything else on a Unix platform is Ansible/salt/cfengine or something like that, not building those tools into a superset service that manages everything. I will also add that managing disparate platforms is never a reality from experience. There are perhaps two core platforms at a company and they are migrated together in blocks, all together. For us, we have a couple of legacy Ubuntu machines that are being canned this month. Everything else is Windows 2012 R2 and FreeBSD 10. The "systemd way" is to provide a monolithic abstraction over many things with a DBus API. It's the equivalent of adding WMI and a registry to a Unix platform i.e. it's against the fundamental tenets of the operating system. Having managed windows systems for years, this is really not something I want to see. Time will tell, but if I'm not right about that then I'll eat all three of my hats. And yes I have experience with systemd as well through evaluation of RHEL7. Within two hours, I'd hit a wall with timedatectl enabling NTP on the machine. The steps to debug the mess were horrible and the issue eventually just spontaneously disappeared. That's reminiscent of the stateful nature of windows which brings back many years of pain in the 1990's and 00's for me.
RexRollman 12y ago
I've been tinkering with NetBSD the last couple of weeks in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine and the RC system it uses it very nice. OpenBSD's is nice as well.
- dobbsbob 12y ago
  NetBSD can run as a xen dom0 host too though normally I use Alpine Linux/OpenRC as dom0 because it's so small.
  - imanaccount247 12y ago
    >NetBSD can run as a xen dom0 host too Isn't there a bunch of fine print that goes along with that? >Alpine Linux How? The installer doesn't even work.

aerique 12y ago

Are there reasons why Linux couldn't just adopt it?

Andys 12y ago
There's nothing stopping a Linux distro doing this.... but It would be a step backwards: it is simpler, and does less stuff, so booting would be slower and some features are missing.
- rjsw 12y ago
  Why would booting be slower ? My BSD systems boot quickly enough for me.
  - chousuke 12y ago
    My FreeBSD system has a 30-second timeout during which the entire boot process is halted because it waits for a default route to the internet... which it won't get, because I haven't configured one. It's pretty dumb, and not enough of a problem for me that I'd figure out how to work around it, but it's a pretty good example.
    - ash 12y ago
      I don't think this 30-second timeout is a bug in FreeBSD or in rc. You may want your server to wait for the network to become available. Ubuntu Server has the same "waiting for network" timeout: http://askubuntu.com/questions/63456/waiting-for-network-configuration-adding-3-to-5-minutes-to-boot-time http://askubuntu.com/questions/63456/waiting-for-network-con...
      - vidarh 12y ago
        But the only reason this is necessary is when the boot system isn't smart enough to start whatever can safely be started through proper dependencies. My experience is that a substantial amount of time is wasted weeding out undesired timeouts in startup scripts, because they lead to increasing downtime.
    - allegory 12y ago
      Just set in rc.conf: defaultrouter="NO" It shouldn't hang.
- allegory 12y ago
  How often do you reboot your kit? Boot time is such a stupid metric even on laptops and stuff where you just suspend/hibernate. My BSD systems (not front-facing and therefore on a lesser patch cycle) rarely get rebooted and neither do the processes so this is indeed moot for me. Proof: http://i.imgur.com/tZsM82Q.png http://i.imgur.com/tZsM82Q.png Yes that's a memcached uptime on a host that has had 10,185,367,932 cache hits...
  - _delirium 12y ago
    Suspend/hibernate on free unixes is a nightmare of incomplete support and buggy drivers, so not much of a solution. I'm don't know a single person who has a working laptop suspend/resume setup on FreeBSD (though it's theoretically possible), and it's not usually recommended to rely on it even if you could get it working. Linux has somewhat more complete support, but it's still very hit or miss, and it's common for stuff to be wonky after a resume, even when it does work.
    - allegory 12y ago
      I'll give you that to a degree. It does suck on FreeBSD with my X201. Nothing works but I'm being cheeky now and running it in VirtualBox on top of windows (which I need for other work). OpenBSD however works wonderfully.
- edwintorok 12y ago
  The main question is would it work? For me systemd or applications starting to support systemd only break things (something wrong with policykit/consolekit for example with sysvinit+systemd-shim) that used to work. Also there are some peculiarities in the way the LSB init script compatibility is implemented in systemd: it tries to be 'smart' and remember their state. So you start an init script, and it failed for some reason / perhaps even exited with an error code, perhaps you are still developing that init script. Now fixing the problem and running the init script / systemctl start doesn't even try to run the script because it thinks it has run it yet. You first have to tell it to stop it (which fails), and only then you can run it again.
vidarh 12y ago
Feel free. Most people won't, as systemd solves very real problems that people care a great deal about, whether or not you like the way it has solved them.
- bigbugbag 12y ago
  15 years linux user here, systemd is pushing me hard towards leaving linux. Please tell me what very real problems people care a great dead bout systemd solved by turning log files from text to binary. Also I care about being able to use my computer and for the first in 15 years a systemd update caused my computer to needlessly dropping into systemd emergency mode at boot and this emergency mode being broken I was effectively locked out of my computer because an optional external usb drive that was defined in fstab with no issue for a couple years now required a nofail option. Now consider that this computer is located in a remote location 1000 km away from where I live. To me systemd already caused way more very real problems I do care a great deal about than it has solved reducing boot time by a few seconds is not something I care that much about.
  - allegory 12y ago
    For me Linux is pretty dead already because I can't entirely trust the direct it's going in having survived the Unix wars of the 1990s. There are so many parallels to that at the moment, it's not funny. There are large vendors pulling it in separate directions (Canonical, Redhat, Google). At the end of the day, much like back then, customers will suffer from terrible support, fragmentation and political battles. I just want to get shit done and solve problems and anything that risks that gets outed now. FreeBSD hits the sweet spot, probably followed by NetBSD.
    - cwyers 12y ago
      "There are large vendors pulling it in separate directions (Canonical, Redhat, Google)." It's pretty clear how that's going to shake out, isn't it? Google is pretty much a non-issue here; yes, Android and ChromeOS use a Linux kernel base, but they have no impact on any mainline distros, and there's no indication Google wants them to. So it reduces down to two parties fighting for control: Canonical and Red Hat. And Red Hat is going to win. Canonical doesn't have the resources to go its own way on more than a handful of fronts (this is why when Debian switched to systemd Upstart was killed off; Canonical is far too reliant on Debian as an upstream to fight every issue), and their requirement for a CLA to accept anyone else's code means they are entirely reliant on their own coders, as nobody wants to sign Canonical's CLAs. We'll see how long they can stick it out on Mir, but they don't have the resources to fight a war with Red Hat on two fronts, so that's the only issue I expect to see them fighting over.
jamesog 12y ago
Slackware uses exactly this system.

_delirium 12y ago

As an init system it works fine, but you do end up having to find or invent a bunch of additional stuff if you want similar functionality to what's driving some of the systemd use-cases. The result might still be better (I haven't done a detailed architectural comparison), but you do need something. For example one of the things I find useful about the "systemd way" of things is that it provides, finally, a story about how to apply cgroups to services in a sane way. The kernel provides the APIs, but actually using them from userspace was not fun previously, with multiple incompatible systems, largely based on tangles of shell scripts that had broken corner cases. With FreeBSD, my impression is that manual shell scripting is still the norm. Integrating RCTL (FreeBSD's resource-limiting facility) with service management basically consists of manually writing in a bunch of imperative calls to RCTL into scripts. There's no way to configure services with limits declaratively, ensure the right thing happens when services are started/stopped, etc., precisely because there's no integration between the RCTL facility and the process-management or init facilities. Or at least I haven't found a way. The closest is that if you need such integration only for jails, you do have the option of third-party "monolithic" management systems, such as CBSD.

allegory 12y ago
RCTL is a stateful database. It's not there yet, but the right solution for managing this declaratively as with anything else on a Unix platform is Ansible/salt/cfengine or something like that, not building those tools into a superset service that manages everything. I will also add that managing disparate platforms is never a reality from experience. There are perhaps two core platforms at a company and they are migrated together in blocks, all together. For us, we have a couple of legacy Ubuntu machines that are being canned this month. Everything else is Windows 2012 R2 and FreeBSD 10. The "systemd way" is to provide a monolithic abstraction over many things with a DBus API. It's the equivalent of adding WMI and a registry to a Unix platform i.e. it's against the fundamental tenets of the operating system. Having managed windows systems for years, this is really not something I want to see. Time will tell, but if I'm not right about that then I'll eat all three of my hats. And yes I have experience with systemd as well through evaluation of RHEL7. Within two hours, I'd hit a wall with timedatectl enabling NTP on the machine. The steps to debug the mess were horrible and the issue eventually just spontaneously disappeared. That's reminiscent of the stateful nature of windows which brings back many years of pain in the 1990's and 00's for me.

RexRollman 12y ago

I've been tinkering with NetBSD the last couple of weeks in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine and the RC system it uses it very nice. OpenBSD's is nice as well.

dobbsbob 12y ago
NetBSD can run as a xen dom0 host too though normally I use Alpine Linux/OpenRC as dom0 because it's so small.
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  >NetBSD can run as a xen dom0 host too Isn't there a bunch of fine print that goes along with that? >Alpine Linux How? The installer doesn't even work.