8 ms·

First Impressions of Systemd, and They Are Not Good

104 points by alrs 12y ago

VLM 12y ago
"But I can’t stay at some early jessie checkpoint forever." We're all moving to freebsd.
- angersock 12y ago
  What would make you pick FreeBSD over, say, Illumos?
  - VLM 12y ago
    More eyes and hands means better faster security patches and similar issues. That's why I don't use "three guys and a github" specialized linux distros. If you follow a similar outlook (and what works for me might not work for you) then a crude google search result indicates the community for freebsd is about 30 times more talkative (30 times bigger?) and some more wikipedia searches reveal freebsd is five times the age WRT stability. I have never heard of Illumos which also implies I've never heard anything bad about it. Although I do personally know people who swear by freebsd, so ... I would probably use a *bsd to avoid all possibility of systemd issues, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sys... implies the big "thing" for freebsd is "usable for any purpose" which is the old Debian "universal OS" concept I like so much. I would strongly consider openbsd for something bare out on the internet not behind a stateful firewall and my limited experience with netbsd is its pretty awesome but being able to boot on a PDP11 necessitates some excessive old code. I'm astounded by retroBSD on PIC32 arch.
    - pessimizer 12y ago
      >I'm astounded by retroBSD on PIC32 arch. And now I am, too. Thanks for this.
    - angersock 12y ago
      Thank you for the explanation--I'm looking at different high-reliability OS's for long-time embedded deployments, and xBSD flavors are looking pretty promising.
    - bingaling 12y ago
      > I have never heard of Illumos which also implies I've never heard anything bad about it. It's the open fork of OpenSolaris after the Oracle takeover of Sun. Many ex-Sun engineers work at companies that use/contribute to Illumos.
  - xenophonf 12y ago
    For me, package management on OpenIndiana sucks. OpenCSW doesn't support IPS yet, the Oracle IPS repo is way outdated, and the SmartOS/pkgsrc packages don't install/build correctly. Compare this with my FreeBSD setup, where I'm building my own package repository with poudriere (which also handles my build customizations) and easily pushing packages and configuration data with Salt. I was especially disappointed with pkgsrc, since I figured that would be easy to get running. That said, I haven't had a chance to try other Illumos distributions like SmartOS or OpenSXCE. Maybe the sysadmin experience is better on them.
- TehCorwiz 12y ago
  I just started exploring freebsd for this very reason.
- vidarh 12y ago
  All five of you.
- _ZeD_ 12y ago
  I rest on my Slack :)
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Volkerding is taking a pragmatic view of all this (as you might have expected). May have to go systemd at some point in the future due to mudballing tendency. [1] [1] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interview-with-patrick-volkerding-of-slackware-949029/ http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interv... Ctrl-F systemd for the section around the middle. I imagine it depends on udev/eudev and logind dependencies in desktops and then d-bus.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  Try Gentoo first.
  - pnathan 12y ago
    As a fellow gentoo-user, I am extremely happy with it.... until it's kernel upgrade time. I've managed to forget the set of flags needed to make my system work as desired. So it's a pretty painful process.
    - 0x420 12y ago
      run `zcat /proc/config.gz > ~/kernelconfig` (i believe that's the right filename for the average Gentoo kernel; haven't booted Gentoo in a long time) and you'll end up with a full list of all the options you chose for your currently running kernel.
      - mieses 12y ago
        This shows all the config options. Options change from kernel to kernel so doing a simple diff does not always reveal the user's intentional config changes. Otherwise gentoo is painless.. in the long term.
        anonbanker 12y ago
        Run "make oldconfig" after zcat. Then the previous config changes are applied.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
      I never used genkernel. When I compile a new kernel version I just eselect it, cd into /usr/src/linux, "zcat /proc/config.gz > .config; make oldconfig" and go through the new options manually. I also have scripts for the modules/kernel installation and the recompilation of packages with kernel modules.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  I noticed the other day that KDE 4 (my current favorite WM) is now running on OpenBSD -- I'm due for a new desktop next year, I'm pretty sure it'll be OpenBSD. I've been looking forward to running that as a daily desktop for years.
- ptx 12y ago
  PC-BSD[0] (the desktop-focused fork of FreeBSD) does look like quite a promising systemd-free alternative to Debian. One potential problem is, as always, that the graphics drivers[1] lag behind Linux, so the latest stuff might not be supported. And until bhyve[2] adds support for Windows guests (which they plan to do) I still need Linux's KVM. [0] http://www.pcbsd.org/ http://www.pcbsd.org/ [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics [2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve
angersock 12y ago
"Have we made a vast mistake that can’t be undone? (If things like even brightness keys * now require systemd…)"* Truly, this will be the year of Linux on the desktop--because it probably won't be on the server much longer, right?
LeafStorm 12y ago
It seems to me that the author's system was in an incredibly unstable state to begin with. He's running a Debian prerelease with an unsupported filesystem, that had gone without updates for months at a time. I have a hard time seeing how changing the init system would not cause problems in a setup like that.
- CoffeeDregs 12y ago
  Agreed. I run Debian Testing and was able to upgrade ~5 machines without a hitch. Yes, I do have some odd behavior with the brightness key (but only when a second display is plugged in...), but I'm running Testing so I'm happy to trade an occasional annoyance for more recent packages. The biggest problem I've had with systemd (I now have about 200 machines running it/Jessie) is that I tend to blame everything on systemd... DHCP problems on boot! Must be systemd! (It wasn't...)
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Yup, let's face it, RedHat have bet the farm on systemd and the facilities/programs that go with it, so it will have to work and work well for 10+ years minimum. RHEL7 and the clones have systemd v208. Debian Testing just had v215 arrive. Freeze is quite soon, so it looks like 215 will be the systemd version that ships, so the packagers will have to backport security fixes to it for the life of Jessie (say 2 years or so). Just wondering how much work that will be if systemd continues to iterate at the speed it is doing... PS: why so many 'machines' (desktop clients, workstations?) running an unstable Debian I'm idly wondering...
- javert 12y ago
  I don't understand why people would choose a non rolling-release distro (e.g. Debian) over a rolling release distro (e.g. Arch). Because the former come with the implicit guarantee that every few months, you have to update EVERYTHING all at once. Seems like a needless risk and pain. Genuinely curious here. There must be an upside to this model, can someone tell me what it is?
  - 12y ago
nisa 12y ago
There is a new blogpost from the author that explains the problems: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-systemd-issue http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-sy... TL;DR: systemd breaks badly (at the moment) when having to deal with non-standard setups (ZFS, cryptsetup)... As for the eternal systemd debate... if someone as knowledgeable as the author (his publications: http://www.complete.org/Publications http://www.complete.org/Publications) can't debug it... we'll have fun times ahead.
- pilif 12y ago
  > TL;DR: systemd breaks badly (at the moment) when having to deal with non-standard setups (ZFS, cryptsetup)... So you're saying that upgrading a custom tweaked configuration grown over the years to be just perfect for that user is going to break when converted to non-customized stock systemd packages? The configuration in question has grown over the months and likely used multiple iterations to get right. You can't expect a stock systemd package to be a perfect drop in replacement. What we really need in order to form an opinion of how badly or how well systemd is going to work, we need real-world examples of systems being upgraded into which only minimal tweaking of the init system has gone. Like all the Arch and Fedora users who are not really complaining about systemd making their systems unstable or causing issues with day to day usage.
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    I should be able to expect exactly that, because systemd's supposed ability to work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit[0] was touted. But suddenly it's unreasonable to expect it to live up to its promises. Convenient. [0] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ ("compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts", "It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.")
  - nisa 12y ago
    No. I think the linked article is pretty clear where the problems are. It's basically assumptions made by systemd that are not always true and from the looks of it a possible bug regarding the ordering of service files and reaction to events. Besides that broken or unusable console output without plymouth (I can't really tell from the article if systemd is responsible for that). That's all fine and possible expected.. my only concern is just that this appears to be very difficult to debug. The author is as knowledgeable as you can hope for in a Linux user and is unable to get meaningful debug output. All of these things are IMHO legitimate concerns that should be addressed by the systemd community or the Debian systemd packagers.
guylhem 12y ago
Long story short - you did it the wrong way. systemd on debian tries to reuse far too many /etc/init.d scripts, whose quality and performance I find questionable. Follow the guide on http://www.holgerschurig.de/linux/systemd.html http://www.holgerschurig.de/linux/systemd.html to get a good experience. You can also use my scripts (cf http://libreboot.org/docs/future/#fastboot http://libreboot.org/docs/future/#fastboot) to compile your systemd For the specific zfs problem, I can't say for sure (I use xfs), but a simple script you wrote yourself is usually the best. I also had fstab related errors for swap (I use luks) until I disabled the automatic stuff and wrote a replacement script. systemd is well done and such fixes don't take long, once you understand the logic of it. (usually a symlink to /dev/null to disable the script and a few lines of ascii text for the replacement) My results: on a thinkpad x60 (2006 era laptop), after coreboot, I boot in about 3 seconds, cf http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2014-July/078215.html http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2014-July/078215.... (link to a youtube video of another person doing the same thing). Suspend works very well out of the box, and even better (ex: renewing dhcp leases) after adding a few scripts. systemd makes many things possible and easy, but with debian at least, the out-of-the-box experience has to be improved. Nothing impossible if you have say a day to spare to learn how systemd works and write your fixes.
- VLM 12y ago
  "if you have say a day to spare" Going to take lifetimes of single tasking / blocking task reboots to run a net profit off that investment of time.
  - hamburglar 12y ago
    Seriously. Number of days I have allocated to fixing a broken init system after my next dist upgrade: 0
- nknighthb 12y ago
  Time and again proponents of systemd belittled those of us with compatibility concerns and assured us of its compatibility[0] with existing scripts and setups. Now that it's been adopted, using that supposed compatibility is "doing it wrong". Imagine my surprise. [0] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ ("compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts", "It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.")
perlpimp 12y ago
systemd intention is great but aftermath is that of talented albeit inexperieced developer writing it. Fact that i have misconfigured one of the services, should not lock me out of machine to the point of needed to boot from usb flash stick. I am not as advanced but that was what I got when put coreOS with systemd on one of our servers - thankfully not production.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Which service was it?
  - perlpimp 12y ago
    I think it was hello world service but after tooling around starting and killing it , rebooted my machine and it machine froze solidly on reboot said something like unable to find mountable systems. but the systems were there with flash drive everything was intact. I've just picked up coreos and I think stuff like while(1); echo "hello world"; sleep 1; maybe it was not that or something else but setup was stock stable 431.
jauer 12y ago
I don't use Linux on the desktop so my experience with systemd is strictly server-side but it just feels like too much magic. I'm used to (and like) Solaris/OI's SMF so I'm certantly not in the "init scripts for life" camp.
nemo 12y ago
"Linux can turn any song into death metal because all you'll be hearing is your own screaming." - Infosec Taylor Swift my other favorite of her's: "Mommy, what's Linux?" "That's what systemd used to be called, Becky."
systemdowntime 12y ago
Just saw the all-hands call on the IRC channels and systemd fanbois groups for an epic show of whiteknighting required yet again on HN where rational folks are trying to discuss the actual and real downsides of systemd - quick, post the rebuttals, choose from: 1. You're doing it wrong 2. Of course, if you use <insert something here>, then it won't work! 3. If you spend a month, it is simple! What, are you lazy? 4. If you hack these bits, disable these bits, run some pointless commands here, then presto it works!
- vacri 12y ago
  Making a throwaway account to post a snide comment doesn't do anything to raise the quality of conversation.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  Posting as breadcrumbs to evidence of systems astroturfing on HN.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  >1. You're doing it wrong Anyone else reminded of the Apple "you are holding it wrong" response to the iPhone antenna short?
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
I'm not sure to what extent this is systemd, the author's setup, or the integration work on part of Debian. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the latter. It turns out that a lot of Linux distros really don't have very adequate systemd bootstraps at this point, which you'll find the systemd developers admitting (including, and in my personal experience, especially for Fedora): http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Optimizations/ http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Optimizations/ When you factor in the fact that Debian and other distributions have some absolutely strange packaging policies concerning when and to where to include systemd as a dependency, coupled with the fact that most distros still don't have good mechanisms for separating hard and soft dependencies, and you get some pretty confused default configurations. I once tried compiling and booting from systemd on a Lubuntu box, out of my own curiosity. It worked, and there were already some predefined unit files from systemd-shim and various system packages. Performance was good. I tried upgrading my system... the process is absolutely broken, due to preinst/postinst scripts assuming Upstart. Sometimes a package will get successfully unpacked, sometimes it won't. Error messages galore. Considering systemd's extensively rapid evolution, I don't see integration work in most distros stabilizing or being optimized very soon.
- hamburglar 12y ago
  I have been half-following this whole saga and as far as I can tell, it's a shit-show on a scale that runs the risk of turning entire distro major releases into complete write-offs. I just hope they only go one release cycle before deciding to abandon it. I'll get on the last pre-systemd LTS and hold my breath. They don't see the benefit of keeping critical system components simple, they don't listen to criticism, they make promises they can't keep, and they've bitten off way more than they're capable of chewing. The only part I really can't figure out is why major distros have actually decided to make the switch way before any of the tech is ready.
  - makomk 12y ago
    One of the things they're planning next is to replace the current kernel VT implementation with a userland terminal emulator that depends on systemd, so you won't even be able to boot with init=/bin/bash in a pinch because without systemd there won't be any terminal to run it on anymore. No idea how people will be expected to diagnose and fix issues that break boot at that point.
CoffeeDregs 12y ago
His follow-up is at: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-systemd-issue http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-sy...
hapless 12y ago
Every time I touch systemd, I find another bug. I never wanted to break out GDB to manage my freaking init.d scripts. * Error in `systemctl': double free or corruption (fasttop): 0x00007f26ef8089c0
- nisa 12y ago
  You are not alone.. after playing around for some hours with CentOS7/RHEL7: https://i.imgur.com/sCiqS2O.png https://i.imgur.com/sCiqS2O.png - The bug is fixed now (nmtui: changing the hostname crashed all of NetworkManager...) now I'm always a little scared when using a freedesktop.org project ;)
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    Look for the names Lennart Poettering, Kay Seivers, and Ulrich Drepper amongst the fd.o project's developers. If you see them, avoid the project. As 90 percent of freedesktop.org projects do not include these developers, you're probably safe, but always good to be sure. The majority of developers on fd.o will happily accept and action bug reports, so don't let these bad apples spoil you on the rest of the bunch.
    - nisa 12y ago
      I'm tired of that name calling. These are just bugs. All these projects fix bugs and honestly I'm personally glad for the work they've done. I don't like their attitude or some design choices but I also lack knowledge. I wouldn't be able to write these software and my complain is mainly a lack of thorough testing. Using C for all these things makes debugging not exactly easier.
      - anonbanker 12y ago
        Just curious, but what names did I call them? Is using their names not allowed? I recognize your nick from systemd's forums and IRC channel. Nice to see you here defending your favorite project.
- 12y ago

104 points by alrs 12y ago

VLM 12y ago

"But I can’t stay at some early jessie checkpoint forever." We're all moving to freebsd.

angersock 12y ago
What would make you pick FreeBSD over, say, Illumos?
- VLM 12y ago
  More eyes and hands means better faster security patches and similar issues. That's why I don't use "three guys and a github" specialized linux distros. If you follow a similar outlook (and what works for me might not work for you) then a crude google search result indicates the community for freebsd is about 30 times more talkative (30 times bigger?) and some more wikipedia searches reveal freebsd is five times the age WRT stability. I have never heard of Illumos which also implies I've never heard anything bad about it. Although I do personally know people who swear by freebsd, so ... I would probably use a *bsd to avoid all possibility of systemd issues, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sys... implies the big "thing" for freebsd is "usable for any purpose" which is the old Debian "universal OS" concept I like so much. I would strongly consider openbsd for something bare out on the internet not behind a stateful firewall and my limited experience with netbsd is its pretty awesome but being able to boot on a PDP11 necessitates some excessive old code. I'm astounded by retroBSD on PIC32 arch.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    >I'm astounded by retroBSD on PIC32 arch. And now I am, too. Thanks for this.
  - angersock 12y ago
    Thank you for the explanation--I'm looking at different high-reliability OS's for long-time embedded deployments, and xBSD flavors are looking pretty promising.
  - bingaling 12y ago
    > I have never heard of Illumos which also implies I've never heard anything bad about it. It's the open fork of OpenSolaris after the Oracle takeover of Sun. Many ex-Sun engineers work at companies that use/contribute to Illumos.
- xenophonf 12y ago
  For me, package management on OpenIndiana sucks. OpenCSW doesn't support IPS yet, the Oracle IPS repo is way outdated, and the SmartOS/pkgsrc packages don't install/build correctly. Compare this with my FreeBSD setup, where I'm building my own package repository with poudriere (which also handles my build customizations) and easily pushing packages and configuration data with Salt. I was especially disappointed with pkgsrc, since I figured that would be easy to get running. That said, I haven't had a chance to try other Illumos distributions like SmartOS or OpenSXCE. Maybe the sysadmin experience is better on them.
TehCorwiz 12y ago
I just started exploring freebsd for this very reason.
vidarh 12y ago
All five of you.
_ZeD_ 12y ago
I rest on my Slack :)
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Volkerding is taking a pragmatic view of all this (as you might have expected). May have to go systemd at some point in the future due to mudballing tendency. [1] [1] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interview-with-patrick-volkerding-of-slackware-949029/ http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interv... Ctrl-F systemd for the section around the middle. I imagine it depends on udev/eudev and logind dependencies in desktops and then d-bus.
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
Try Gentoo first.
- pnathan 12y ago
  As a fellow gentoo-user, I am extremely happy with it.... until it's kernel upgrade time. I've managed to forget the set of flags needed to make my system work as desired. So it's a pretty painful process.
  - 0x420 12y ago
    run `zcat /proc/config.gz > ~/kernelconfig` (i believe that's the right filename for the average Gentoo kernel; haven't booted Gentoo in a long time) and you'll end up with a full list of all the options you chose for your currently running kernel.
    - mieses 12y ago
      This shows all the config options. Options change from kernel to kernel so doing a simple diff does not always reveal the user's intentional config changes. Otherwise gentoo is painless.. in the long term.
      - anonbanker 12y ago
        Run "make oldconfig" after zcat. Then the previous config changes are applied.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    I never used genkernel. When I compile a new kernel version I just eselect it, cd into /usr/src/linux, "zcat /proc/config.gz > .config; make oldconfig" and go through the new options manually. I also have scripts for the modules/kernel installation and the recompilation of packages with kernel modules.
thaumaturgy 12y ago
I noticed the other day that KDE 4 (my current favorite WM) is now running on OpenBSD -- I'm due for a new desktop next year, I'm pretty sure it'll be OpenBSD. I've been looking forward to running that as a daily desktop for years.
ptx 12y ago
PC-BSD[0] (the desktop-focused fork of FreeBSD) does look like quite a promising systemd-free alternative to Debian. One potential problem is, as always, that the graphics drivers[1] lag behind Linux, so the latest stuff might not be supported. And until bhyve[2] adds support for Windows guests (which they plan to do) I still need Linux's KVM. [0] http://www.pcbsd.org/ http://www.pcbsd.org/ [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics [2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve

angersock 12y ago

"Have we made a vast mistake that can’t be undone? (If things like even brightness keys * now require systemd…)"* Truly, this will be the year of Linux on the desktop--because it probably won't be on the server much longer, right?

LeafStorm 12y ago

It seems to me that the author's system was in an incredibly unstable state to begin with. He's running a Debian prerelease with an unsupported filesystem, that had gone without updates for months at a time. I have a hard time seeing how changing the init system would not cause problems in a setup like that.

CoffeeDregs 12y ago
Agreed. I run Debian Testing and was able to upgrade ~5 machines without a hitch. Yes, I do have some odd behavior with the brightness key (but only when a second display is plugged in...), but I'm running Testing so I'm happy to trade an occasional annoyance for more recent packages. The biggest problem I've had with systemd (I now have about 200 machines running it/Jessie) is that I tend to blame everything on systemd... DHCP problems on boot! Must be systemd! (It wasn't...)
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Yup, let's face it, RedHat have bet the farm on systemd and the facilities/programs that go with it, so it will have to work and work well for 10+ years minimum. RHEL7 and the clones have systemd v208. Debian Testing just had v215 arrive. Freeze is quite soon, so it looks like 215 will be the systemd version that ships, so the packagers will have to backport security fixes to it for the life of Jessie (say 2 years or so). Just wondering how much work that will be if systemd continues to iterate at the speed it is doing... PS: why so many 'machines' (desktop clients, workstations?) running an unstable Debian I'm idly wondering...
javert 12y ago
I don't understand why people would choose a non rolling-release distro (e.g. Debian) over a rolling release distro (e.g. Arch). Because the former come with the implicit guarantee that every few months, you have to update EVERYTHING all at once. Seems like a needless risk and pain. Genuinely curious here. There must be an upside to this model, can someone tell me what it is?
- 12y ago

nisa 12y ago

There is a new blogpost from the author that explains the problems: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-systemd-issue http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-sy... TL;DR: systemd breaks badly (at the moment) when having to deal with non-standard setups (ZFS, cryptsetup)... As for the eternal systemd debate... if someone as knowledgeable as the author (his publications: http://www.complete.org/Publications http://www.complete.org/Publications) can't debug it... we'll have fun times ahead.

pilif 12y ago
> TL;DR: systemd breaks badly (at the moment) when having to deal with non-standard setups (ZFS, cryptsetup)... So you're saying that upgrading a custom tweaked configuration grown over the years to be just perfect for that user is going to break when converted to non-customized stock systemd packages? The configuration in question has grown over the months and likely used multiple iterations to get right. You can't expect a stock systemd package to be a perfect drop in replacement. What we really need in order to form an opinion of how badly or how well systemd is going to work, we need real-world examples of systems being upgraded into which only minimal tweaking of the init system has gone. Like all the Arch and Fedora users who are not really complaining about systemd making their systems unstable or causing issues with day to day usage.
- nknighthb 12y ago
  I should be able to expect exactly that, because systemd's supposed ability to work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit[0] was touted. But suddenly it's unreasonable to expect it to live up to its promises. Convenient. [0] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ ("compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts", "It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.")
- nisa 12y ago
  No. I think the linked article is pretty clear where the problems are. It's basically assumptions made by systemd that are not always true and from the looks of it a possible bug regarding the ordering of service files and reaction to events. Besides that broken or unusable console output without plymouth (I can't really tell from the article if systemd is responsible for that). That's all fine and possible expected.. my only concern is just that this appears to be very difficult to debug. The author is as knowledgeable as you can hope for in a Linux user and is unable to get meaningful debug output. All of these things are IMHO legitimate concerns that should be addressed by the systemd community or the Debian systemd packagers.

guylhem 12y ago

Long story short - you did it the wrong way. systemd on debian tries to reuse far too many /etc/init.d scripts, whose quality and performance I find questionable. Follow the guide on http://www.holgerschurig.de/linux/systemd.html http://www.holgerschurig.de/linux/systemd.html to get a good experience. You can also use my scripts (cf http://libreboot.org/docs/future/#fastboot http://libreboot.org/docs/future/#fastboot) to compile your systemd For the specific zfs problem, I can't say for sure (I use xfs), but a simple script you wrote yourself is usually the best. I also had fstab related errors for swap (I use luks) until I disabled the automatic stuff and wrote a replacement script. systemd is well done and such fixes don't take long, once you understand the logic of it. (usually a symlink to /dev/null to disable the script and a few lines of ascii text for the replacement) My results: on a thinkpad x60 (2006 era laptop), after coreboot, I boot in about 3 seconds, cf http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2014-July/078215.html http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2014-July/078215.... (link to a youtube video of another person doing the same thing). Suspend works very well out of the box, and even better (ex: renewing dhcp leases) after adding a few scripts. systemd makes many things possible and easy, but with debian at least, the out-of-the-box experience has to be improved. Nothing impossible if you have say a day to spare to learn how systemd works and write your fixes.

VLM 12y ago
"if you have say a day to spare" Going to take lifetimes of single tasking / blocking task reboots to run a net profit off that investment of time.
- hamburglar 12y ago
  Seriously. Number of days I have allocated to fixing a broken init system after my next dist upgrade: 0
nknighthb 12y ago
Time and again proponents of systemd belittled those of us with compatibility concerns and assured us of its compatibility[0] with existing scripts and setups. Now that it's been adopted, using that supposed compatibility is "doing it wrong". Imagine my surprise. [0] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ ("compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts", "It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.")

perlpimp 12y ago

systemd intention is great but aftermath is that of talented albeit inexperieced developer writing it. Fact that i have misconfigured one of the services, should not lock me out of machine to the point of needed to boot from usb flash stick. I am not as advanced but that was what I got when put coreOS with systemd on one of our servers - thankfully not production.

XorNot 12y ago
Which service was it?
- perlpimp 12y ago
  I think it was hello world service but after tooling around starting and killing it , rebooted my machine and it machine froze solidly on reboot said something like unable to find mountable systems. but the systems were there with flash drive everything was intact. I've just picked up coreos and I think stuff like while(1); echo "hello world"; sleep 1; maybe it was not that or something else but setup was stock stable 431.

jauer 12y ago

I don't use Linux on the desktop so my experience with systemd is strictly server-side but it just feels like too much magic. I'm used to (and like) Solaris/OI's SMF so I'm certantly not in the "init scripts for life" camp.

nemo 12y ago

"Linux can turn any song into death metal because all you'll be hearing is your own screaming." - Infosec Taylor Swift my other favorite of her's: "Mommy, what's Linux?" "That's what systemd used to be called, Becky."

systemdowntime 12y ago

Just saw the all-hands call on the IRC channels and systemd fanbois groups for an epic show of whiteknighting required yet again on HN where rational folks are trying to discuss the actual and real downsides of systemd - quick, post the rebuttals, choose from: 1. You're doing it wrong 2. Of course, if you use <insert something here>, then it won't work! 3. If you spend a month, it is simple! What, are you lazy? 4. If you hack these bits, disable these bits, run some pointless commands here, then presto it works!

vacri 12y ago
Making a throwaway account to post a snide comment doesn't do anything to raise the quality of conversation.
anonbanker 12y ago
Posting as breadcrumbs to evidence of systems astroturfing on HN.
digi_owl 12y ago
>1. You're doing it wrong Anyone else reminded of the Apple "you are holding it wrong" response to the iPhone antenna short?

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

I'm not sure to what extent this is systemd, the author's setup, or the integration work on part of Debian. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the latter. It turns out that a lot of Linux distros really don't have very adequate systemd bootstraps at this point, which you'll find the systemd developers admitting (including, and in my personal experience, especially for Fedora): http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Optimizations/ http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Optimizations/ When you factor in the fact that Debian and other distributions have some absolutely strange packaging policies concerning when and to where to include systemd as a dependency, coupled with the fact that most distros still don't have good mechanisms for separating hard and soft dependencies, and you get some pretty confused default configurations. I once tried compiling and booting from systemd on a Lubuntu box, out of my own curiosity. It worked, and there were already some predefined unit files from systemd-shim and various system packages. Performance was good. I tried upgrading my system... the process is absolutely broken, due to preinst/postinst scripts assuming Upstart. Sometimes a package will get successfully unpacked, sometimes it won't. Error messages galore. Considering systemd's extensively rapid evolution, I don't see integration work in most distros stabilizing or being optimized very soon.

hamburglar 12y ago
I have been half-following this whole saga and as far as I can tell, it's a shit-show on a scale that runs the risk of turning entire distro major releases into complete write-offs. I just hope they only go one release cycle before deciding to abandon it. I'll get on the last pre-systemd LTS and hold my breath. They don't see the benefit of keeping critical system components simple, they don't listen to criticism, they make promises they can't keep, and they've bitten off way more than they're capable of chewing. The only part I really can't figure out is why major distros have actually decided to make the switch way before any of the tech is ready.
- makomk 12y ago
  One of the things they're planning next is to replace the current kernel VT implementation with a userland terminal emulator that depends on systemd, so you won't even be able to boot with init=/bin/bash in a pinch because without systemd there won't be any terminal to run it on anymore. No idea how people will be expected to diagnose and fix issues that break boot at that point.

CoffeeDregs 12y ago

His follow-up is at: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-systemd-issue http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-sy...

hapless 12y ago

Every time I touch systemd, I find another bug. I never wanted to break out GDB to manage my freaking init.d scripts. * Error in `systemctl': double free or corruption (fasttop): 0x00007f26ef8089c0

nisa 12y ago
You are not alone.. after playing around for some hours with CentOS7/RHEL7: https://i.imgur.com/sCiqS2O.png https://i.imgur.com/sCiqS2O.png - The bug is fixed now (nmtui: changing the hostname crashed all of NetworkManager...) now I'm always a little scared when using a freedesktop.org project ;)
- anonbanker 12y ago
  Look for the names Lennart Poettering, Kay Seivers, and Ulrich Drepper amongst the fd.o project's developers. If you see them, avoid the project. As 90 percent of freedesktop.org projects do not include these developers, you're probably safe, but always good to be sure. The majority of developers on fd.o will happily accept and action bug reports, so don't let these bad apples spoil you on the rest of the bunch.
  - nisa 12y ago
    I'm tired of that name calling. These are just bugs. All these projects fix bugs and honestly I'm personally glad for the work they've done. I don't like their attitude or some design choices but I also lack knowledge. I wouldn't be able to write these software and my complain is mainly a lack of thorough testing. Using C for all these things makes debugging not exactly easier.
    - anonbanker 12y ago
      Just curious, but what names did I call them? Is using their names not allowed? I recognize your nick from systemd's forums and IRC channel. Nice to see you here defending your favorite project.
12y ago