17 ms·

The Systemd Chronicles

92 points by stargrave 11y ago

justizin 11y ago
It seems like the argument being made here is that perhaps the systemd developers are afraid / unable to innovate in the kernel, which is in fact the overall system-wide daemon and parent to all processes.
- EmanueleAina 11y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your comment. Are you proposing to move all the systemd features in the kernel? Why do you think it would be a good idea. Note that one of the stated goals for systemd is to make good use of all the new fancy features are already available in the Linux kernel but not many people use because they are not portable (eg. control groups). Also note that some cool features have already been merged in the Linux the kernel after the systemd developers created them (eg. memfd).
- davidstrauss 11y ago
  If that were the case, wouldn't the author support the kdbus work? It seems like they're not a fan of that, either, given the (misleading) complaints about systemd's support for kdbus. Edit: phrasing
- c_rrodriguez 11y ago
  People working on systemd have submitted hundreds of kernel patches and implemented features that already are in the mainline kernel.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Well their way of doing things would not get past Torvalds. Heck, he has more than once chewed out one of the principal systemd devs (Kay Sievers) for violating central rules of kernel development.
AceJohnny2 11y ago
This article is inflammatory, in bad faith, and in many places blatantly incorrect. I appreciate a lot of suckless work, but I don't see what this is adding.
- czardoz 11y ago
  Just out of curiosity, can you summarize where exactly it is wrong?
  - exelius 11y ago
    The tone is very negative and does not allow that there might actually be legitimate reasons for wanting systemd to do things that it does. It just reeks of fanboy drivel, not a well-reasoned analysis taking into account multiple viewpoints. This is the type of content I would expect on Reddit or Slashdot, but not HN.
  - witty_username 11y ago
    See my comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9982777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9982777
  - davidstrauss 11y ago
    As a systemd committer, I certainly can. I don't have time for all of them, so I'll pull the first couple and a few other egregious ones. > Systemd was introduced to decrease the boot up time. Now that they do not understand all implications and dependencies, let us add some artifical time we found out might work for the developers laptops. More on this small world hypothesis of the systemd devleopers below. systemd was not introduced to decrease boot time; it was introduced to properly manage dependencies and parallelism. Such an approach happens to massively improve boot times in many cases, but that's a side-effect. The delay introduced is specifically to account for the slow/unreliable initialization of certain docking station hardware that has no other known reliable method for detection. (This is what happens in Linux with certain reverse-engineered hardware.) Importantly, this delay doesn't impact boot time, only introduces a delay before allowing the system to sleep, so even the (made up) point about systemd being about boot times isn't affected here. > Screen brightness is something that should crash your boot up when it is not working. The TODO item is about avoiding restoration of screen brightness at boot to such a low level that some laptops consider it to be a "backlight off" state. Someone may have shut a laptop down (even automatically) with the backlight off, but we think it should probably turn back on on the next boot. Absolutely nothing to do with "crashing" bootup. > Systemd made kdbus non-optional in its release. Totally made up. systemd's DBus library provides equivalent support for usermode DBus and kdbus. > This one is a setback. Why is there no default editor in systemd in case of factory reset? I'm not sure what this is even claiming. Is this some sort of trolling about complexity the author thinks systemd will eventually add and is some sort of advance critique? In general, the piece shows disingenuous portrayal of actual issues to the level of clickbait and fails to understand that not everything in systemd's git repository runs as part of PID 1 (like the network management tools, for example, are a totally separate and optional daemon).
ossreality 11y ago
Seriously? Inaccurate FUD. systemd is the best thing to happen to Linux lately. We're finally going to get stateless systems and verified boot. It takes an actual idiot to not understand the value of these things.
voidz 11y ago
In this discussion on HN, I hope that people of both sides will permit everyone to have their own opinion on systemd without becoming as emotional or angry as the last time. Topics about systemd tend to get out of hand way too fast and often. In the past I've been blamed for saying I really dislike systemd but my arguments were not even read. The same thing the other way around: I've seen people who dislike systemd flame the people who do enjoy it. Let's just not repeat that kind of discussion; we can do better. Getting emotional about something is not always a bad thing, IMO. But let's just respect that different people hold different opinions, especially with something as controversial as systemd. Let's just aim at being constructive here.
- rc4algorithm 11y ago
  Some tasteful flaming is healthy in situations like this. Many people consider systemd to be a hijacking of the projects that they base their careers and livelihoods on, and many people see hundreds or thousands of hours of work they've invested being steered in an unsavory direction by a corporation or three.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnny22 11y ago
    and many people have been waiting for something like systemd to appear since they started using Linux in the 90s :)
    - rc4algorithm 11y ago
      Who?
      - cjsthompson 11y ago
        Me
        11y ago
fredsted 11y ago
Unfortunately it looks like a lot of the links are broken. At least, I don't see the connection to what the first link about logind has to do with udev.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
0xFFC 11y ago
I have theory in my mind , I hope I can find an answer for it in HN. I always wondered about how companies like Redhat and Samsung driving open source project . The way they pushed systemd to Linux community . The way Intel developer designed Gnome 3 for touch screen rather than Desktops .Is it true ? for example Company X by recruiting most of lead maintainer of project Y , They almost take control of its direction . Is this feasible scenario ? Is this is what happened around sysmted controversy ?
- EmanueleAina 11y ago
  RedHat and Samsung open source contributions aren't really comparable, despite the latter having got much better lately. Despite me being a long time Debian user, I've always appreciated how RedHat employees have always been community members first and RH employees second. Note that systemd was not pushed to anything: several members of the various open source communities appreciated their features and considered it worth to be used and even made the default. Please read the long, technical and detailed discussion Debian had before choosing systemd as their default init system while still providing sysvinit as a supported choice: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708 Also Intel developers didn't design GNOME 3 for touch screens. Sure, Clutter development was at some point carried on by Intel, but most of the GNOME design comes from RedHat and volunteers. That said, it's true that GNOME cares for keyboard, mouse and touch interaction: and I'm very happy that they care about touch, thanks to them using the touchscreen on my new laptop has been a pleasure. To answer your concerns, both systemd and GNOME see a big investment from RedHat in their development, but the developers are influencing RedHat's choices more than the opposite. Keep also in mind that a huge number of contributions still comes from non-RedHat developers for both systemd and GNOME, at the moment there's no risk that the company will drag these projects where their maintainers don't want to go.
  - na85 11y ago
    systemd was certainly pushed to RHEL and Fedora. Debian lacks strong leadership with vision, and so they simply did what they always do which is to blindly follow RedHat's lead.
witty_username 11y ago
> 8x ctrl + alt + del > In systemd you press eight times Ctrl+Alt+Del to trigger reboot. Like many of the other points, this one is plain incorrect. > When the user presses Ctrl-Alt-Del more than 7x within 2s an immediate reboot is triggered. This useful if shutdown is hung and is unable to complete, to expedite the operation. Note that this kind of reboot will still unmount all file systems, and hence should not result in fsck being run on next reboot. Systemd is reboots your system quickly if you press it multiple times. Ctrl-Alt-Del still reboots your system. > floppy group removed > Because we know what is right to know about groups. This is just one example of the mass of group name dependencies systemd is adding. See sinit for how to not need such dependencies. WTF? systemd is removing an obsolete group, not adding one. > systemd-pm > Power management is required on boot up. You're right in this one and it's a GoodThing(tm). Hopefully we might see better hibernate and sleep support. > factory reset > Welcome to the Windows OEM world: Factory reset for Linux! Of course it is in your init process. Yes, all features of Windows are BadThings(tm).
- falcolas 11y ago
  > Ctrl-Alt-Del still reboots your system. Actually, it triggers a script. which should "typically" point at the reboot script. It might not, though. So, if you absolutely want to reboot, you have to do the 8x ctl-alt-delete http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.special.html http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.spec... ctrl-alt-del.target systemd starts this target whenever Control+Alt+Del is pressed on the console. Usually this should be aliased (symlinked) to reboot.target. [EDIT] To address your new, edited in points: > WTF? systemd is removing an obsolete group, not adding one. Deleting groups is a bigger problem than adding groups, since it can cause subtle errors in Linux. Deleting a long existing group can break software which depends on it (rightly or not), and if its GID is re-used for another group, other pieces of software can start quietly doing the wrong thing. > You're right in this one and it's a GoodThing The problem is that it's another thing which can break at startup, and is now in the critical path to system stability. Suckless promotes simplicity, this is not simple. > Yes, all features of Windows are BadThings When in the critical path for system stability? Yes. I like quite a few different windows functionality points myself, but having those things suddenly moved from a relatively safe "child of PID 1" to the system critical "PID 1", they have to work perfectly, every time. Needless to say, they don't.
na85 11y ago
The need to replace sysvinit was/is valid but systemd is truly a horrible piece of software. I would argue that systemd has (greatly) increased overall complexity and simply camouflaged it by moving most of the logic out of init scripts (unit files) and into program logic. And then added an http server and binary logs. The original submission title, while editorialized, was pretty apt in my opinion. There really does seem to be a core group of people involved with the GNOME, RedHat, and systemd projects that seem to want to add features just for the sake of adding features, or perhaps so that they have something to claim ownership of. Gnome basically decided that text-basd configuration was too sane and opted for a mix of config files and the Windows Registry (gconf, dconf) which is a hilariously poor design choice. One-size-fits-all doesn't work unless you are Apple and your users will happily swallow your marketing BS and wait in line to buy a new iphone every 2 years. The startup world is rife with the notions of "out with the old, in with the new" and "change for change's sake" so it's not surprising to me that a great deal of HN readers are Poettering apologists. But to me, it sure seems like systemd is just a chance for Poettering and some others to pad their resumés, or else perhaps simply an ego trip. I honestly can't find anything about it that makes me go "hmm, that's a good feature that outweighs all the other negative parts".
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  systemd clicked for me when I started realizing that a lot of its decisions mapped directly to Red Hat business decisions in cloud computing and containers, like their backing of Project Atomic. nspawn, the "stateless" system features through dynamic configuration population, GPT partition discovery deprecating fstab(5), having a big centralized blob journal, the embedded network management (which is mostly useful for container deployments rather than desktops) and NSS extensions, the GNOME system upgrade logic and so on. It's theoretically meant to be general-purpose, but it really shines at virtualized deployments and some desktops because of the multi-seat integration (though logind these days has some power management features that is just as relevant for servers).
  - davidstrauss 11y ago
    I don't think Red Hat was the driving force behind systemd's container and VM integration. systemd-nspawn was created to provide rapid testing of systemd, and it was (and, for now, still is) marked as an experimental utility that isn't for production purposes. If you look at many of the early blog posts mentioning systemd and containers/VMs, you'll actually see my work and my company (Pantheon) mentioned more than Red Hat. In more recent posts, you'll see lots of CoreOS influence. Project Atomic isn't working with systemd in any direct, significant way; you won't see much coordination other than in some shared philosophy about a stateless base OS, and even that is more attributable to CoreOS's influence than Red Hat's. I think the influence of Red Hat on systemd is overstated. Of the two perspectives: (1) Red Hat driving everything and (2) Lennart answering mostly to himself, the latter is way more accurate, for better or worse (depending on your opinion of him).
eeperson 11y ago
This is a pretty bad list of issues with systemd. A large portion of criticisms in this list seems to be due to a misunderstanding of the author about what is actually in the systemd git repo. The git repo contains udev and other deamons in addition to the init process. As a result, most of the claims on this page about things going in to the init process are incorrect. If you look the actual release notes they are usually referencing a completely different daemon. For example the line 'pid 1 does DNS' points to a release note about a separate daemon called 'systemd-resolved'. edit: grammar
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Well the devs has brought that on themselves by naming the init binary and the overall project the same, and then dumping more and more into a singular code repository.
  - eeperson 11y ago
    So its the systemd developers' fault that this is not a very good list of issues?
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      They could have killed the confusion early by either renaming the init (or the project), or keeping the daemons in a different place from the Systemd init code. But instead they lump more and more into a single tree. You can't just grab the Resolved code to look at it, you have to grab the whole Systemd ball and then extract the portion related to Resolved. And will Resolved even function without Systemd sitting as the init?
  - davidstrauss 11y ago
    The entire BSD kernel and init system are all in one repository. Are those developers "bringing on" confusion by doing that?
grabcocque 11y ago
Really, is it necessary to have another systemd perma-sulk?
EmanueleAina 11y ago
> * sysv removed http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/NEWS?id=2d1ca11270e66777c90a449096203afebc37ec9c#n1651 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/NEWS?id=2d1... > We have won. Now remove all remains of our defeated enemy as fast as we can. As said in the beginning of the systemd crusade against the UNIX infidels: »You can patch it out.« It is no more there. Are we really complaining that LSB script support has been moved out of PID1 to a separate binary? Wasn't one of the major point for critics that systemd has too much in PID1?
- c_rrodriguez 11y ago
  Yes..you figured out that you can't win with these people.. whatever you do they are going to complain. They are not interested in any constructive criticism.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU Pot, meet kettle...
    - EmanueleAina 11y ago
      Nope, that's not really the same thing.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cjsthompson 11y ago
The noble knights of UNIX lore and traditions are at it again. Lo and behold! Armed with the arcane power of ancient spaghetti code shell scripts and logical fallacies, they grep their way through enemy lines to banish the dreaded modernity once and for all.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  ancient spaghetti code shell scripts and logical fallacies Sounds like self-projection. Read this: http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ Then again the fact that you're harping on SysV initscripts when alternatives have been around for ages makes me strongly believe you're trolling.
  - cjsthompson 11y ago
    Yes I'm trolling/mocking you anti-systemd retards. That's what Schopenhauer recommends as a strategy against irrational rhetoric (here of the reactionary kind). I couldn't care less for irrational people's reading recommendations. P.S.: "Self-projection" is psychobabble grounded in no science.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      I'm not even anti-systemd, but I can certainly use you as ammunition against systemd proponents if the time ever comes. Thank you kindly for lacking self-control and giving me this opportunity.
      - cjsthompson 11y ago
        No, you just can't recognize that systemd is objectively and clearly superior to every other Linux init system by just about every measure. In fact, systemd is revolutionary in it's own right and that's why it is hated so much. People who actually design operating systems — as opposed to basement-dwelling traditionalists — have expressed admiration for it. Haiku are doing their own systemd inspired init system. And there's been FreeBSD developers talking of doing their own as well. Supposing you're the idiot who wrote that article you linked, the whole "I take no sides" thing is called the middle ground fallacy. Ironic that you should speak of "ape brain" when you either endorse or perhaps wrote such an article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation Oh, and speaking of self-control, aren't you the idiot who couldn't resist replying to my obviously satyrical comment in the first place?
jrk_ 11y ago
> Führerbunker You know that it is these kind of things that makes you look immature and discreditable no matter how valid your arguments are? Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging. I understand that this is a certain kind of humor, but there are many who don't and who will judge you for it.
jamiesonbecker 11y ago
Title is incorrect. Should either be 'sucks - systemd' or 'Systemd is the best example of Suck.'

92 points by stargrave 11y ago

It seems like the argument being made here is that perhaps the systemd developers are afraid / unable to innovate in the kernel, which is in fact the overall system-wide daemon and parent to all processes.

EmanueleAina 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand your comment. Are you proposing to move all the systemd features in the kernel? Why do you think it would be a good idea. Note that one of the stated goals for systemd is to make good use of all the new fancy features are already available in the Linux kernel but not many people use because they are not portable (eg. control groups). Also note that some cool features have already been merged in the Linux the kernel after the systemd developers created them (eg. memfd).
davidstrauss 11y ago
If that were the case, wouldn't the author support the kdbus work? It seems like they're not a fan of that, either, given the (misleading) complaints about systemd's support for kdbus. Edit: phrasing
c_rrodriguez 11y ago
People working on systemd have submitted hundreds of kernel patches and implemented features that already are in the mainline kernel.
digi_owl 11y ago
Well their way of doing things would not get past Torvalds. Heck, he has more than once chewed out one of the principal systemd devs (Kay Sievers) for violating central rules of kernel development.

AceJohnny2 11y ago

This article is inflammatory, in bad faith, and in many places blatantly incorrect. I appreciate a lot of suckless work, but I don't see what this is adding.

czardoz 11y ago
Just out of curiosity, can you summarize where exactly it is wrong?
- exelius 11y ago
  The tone is very negative and does not allow that there might actually be legitimate reasons for wanting systemd to do things that it does. It just reeks of fanboy drivel, not a well-reasoned analysis taking into account multiple viewpoints. This is the type of content I would expect on Reddit or Slashdot, but not HN.
- witty_username 11y ago
  See my comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9982777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9982777
- davidstrauss 11y ago
  As a systemd committer, I certainly can. I don't have time for all of them, so I'll pull the first couple and a few other egregious ones. > Systemd was introduced to decrease the boot up time. Now that they do not understand all implications and dependencies, let us add some artifical time we found out might work for the developers laptops. More on this small world hypothesis of the systemd devleopers below. systemd was not introduced to decrease boot time; it was introduced to properly manage dependencies and parallelism. Such an approach happens to massively improve boot times in many cases, but that's a side-effect. The delay introduced is specifically to account for the slow/unreliable initialization of certain docking station hardware that has no other known reliable method for detection. (This is what happens in Linux with certain reverse-engineered hardware.) Importantly, this delay doesn't impact boot time, only introduces a delay before allowing the system to sleep, so even the (made up) point about systemd being about boot times isn't affected here. > Screen brightness is something that should crash your boot up when it is not working. The TODO item is about avoiding restoration of screen brightness at boot to such a low level that some laptops consider it to be a "backlight off" state. Someone may have shut a laptop down (even automatically) with the backlight off, but we think it should probably turn back on on the next boot. Absolutely nothing to do with "crashing" bootup. > Systemd made kdbus non-optional in its release. Totally made up. systemd's DBus library provides equivalent support for usermode DBus and kdbus. > This one is a setback. Why is there no default editor in systemd in case of factory reset? I'm not sure what this is even claiming. Is this some sort of trolling about complexity the author thinks systemd will eventually add and is some sort of advance critique? In general, the piece shows disingenuous portrayal of actual issues to the level of clickbait and fails to understand that not everything in systemd's git repository runs as part of PID 1 (like the network management tools, for example, are a totally separate and optional daemon).

ossreality 11y ago

Seriously? Inaccurate FUD. systemd is the best thing to happen to Linux lately. We're finally going to get stateless systems and verified boot. It takes an actual idiot to not understand the value of these things.

voidz 11y ago

In this discussion on HN, I hope that people of both sides will permit everyone to have their own opinion on systemd without becoming as emotional or angry as the last time. Topics about systemd tend to get out of hand way too fast and often. In the past I've been blamed for saying I really dislike systemd but my arguments were not even read. The same thing the other way around: I've seen people who dislike systemd flame the people who do enjoy it. Let's just not repeat that kind of discussion; we can do better. Getting emotional about something is not always a bad thing, IMO. But let's just respect that different people hold different opinions, especially with something as controversial as systemd. Let's just aim at being constructive here.

rc4algorithm 11y ago
Some tasteful flaming is healthy in situations like this. Many people consider systemd to be a hijacking of the projects that they base their careers and livelihoods on, and many people see hundreds or thousands of hours of work they've invested being steered in an unsavory direction by a corporation or three.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- johnny22 11y ago
  and many people have been waiting for something like systemd to appear since they started using Linux in the 90s :)
  - rc4algorithm 11y ago
    Who?
    - cjsthompson 11y ago
      Me
      - 11y ago

fredsted 11y ago

Unfortunately it looks like a lot of the links are broken. At least, I don't see the connection to what the first link about logind has to do with udev.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

0xFFC 11y ago

I have theory in my mind , I hope I can find an answer for it in HN. I always wondered about how companies like Redhat and Samsung driving open source project . The way they pushed systemd to Linux community . The way Intel developer designed Gnome 3 for touch screen rather than Desktops .Is it true ? for example Company X by recruiting most of lead maintainer of project Y , They almost take control of its direction . Is this feasible scenario ? Is this is what happened around sysmted controversy ?

EmanueleAina 11y ago
RedHat and Samsung open source contributions aren't really comparable, despite the latter having got much better lately. Despite me being a long time Debian user, I've always appreciated how RedHat employees have always been community members first and RH employees second. Note that systemd was not pushed to anything: several members of the various open source communities appreciated their features and considered it worth to be used and even made the default. Please read the long, technical and detailed discussion Debian had before choosing systemd as their default init system while still providing sysvinit as a supported choice: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708 Also Intel developers didn't design GNOME 3 for touch screens. Sure, Clutter development was at some point carried on by Intel, but most of the GNOME design comes from RedHat and volunteers. That said, it's true that GNOME cares for keyboard, mouse and touch interaction: and I'm very happy that they care about touch, thanks to them using the touchscreen on my new laptop has been a pleasure. To answer your concerns, both systemd and GNOME see a big investment from RedHat in their development, but the developers are influencing RedHat's choices more than the opposite. Keep also in mind that a huge number of contributions still comes from non-RedHat developers for both systemd and GNOME, at the moment there's no risk that the company will drag these projects where their maintainers don't want to go.
- na85 11y ago
  systemd was certainly pushed to RHEL and Fedora. Debian lacks strong leadership with vision, and so they simply did what they always do which is to blindly follow RedHat's lead.

witty_username 11y ago

> 8x ctrl + alt + del > In systemd you press eight times Ctrl+Alt+Del to trigger reboot. Like many of the other points, this one is plain incorrect. > When the user presses Ctrl-Alt-Del more than 7x within 2s an immediate reboot is triggered. This useful if shutdown is hung and is unable to complete, to expedite the operation. Note that this kind of reboot will still unmount all file systems, and hence should not result in fsck being run on next reboot. Systemd is reboots your system quickly if you press it multiple times. Ctrl-Alt-Del still reboots your system. > floppy group removed > Because we know what is right to know about groups. This is just one example of the mass of group name dependencies systemd is adding. See sinit for how to not need such dependencies. WTF? systemd is removing an obsolete group, not adding one. > systemd-pm > Power management is required on boot up. You're right in this one and it's a GoodThing(tm). Hopefully we might see better hibernate and sleep support. > factory reset > Welcome to the Windows OEM world: Factory reset for Linux! Of course it is in your init process. Yes, all features of Windows are BadThings(tm).

falcolas 11y ago
> Ctrl-Alt-Del still reboots your system. Actually, it triggers a script. which should "typically" point at the reboot script. It might not, though. So, if you absolutely want to reboot, you have to do the 8x ctl-alt-delete http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.special.html http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.spec... ctrl-alt-del.target systemd starts this target whenever Control+Alt+Del is pressed on the console. Usually this should be aliased (symlinked) to reboot.target. [EDIT] To address your new, edited in points: > WTF? systemd is removing an obsolete group, not adding one. Deleting groups is a bigger problem than adding groups, since it can cause subtle errors in Linux. Deleting a long existing group can break software which depends on it (rightly or not), and if its GID is re-used for another group, other pieces of software can start quietly doing the wrong thing. > You're right in this one and it's a GoodThing The problem is that it's another thing which can break at startup, and is now in the critical path to system stability. Suckless promotes simplicity, this is not simple. > Yes, all features of Windows are BadThings When in the critical path for system stability? Yes. I like quite a few different windows functionality points myself, but having those things suddenly moved from a relatively safe "child of PID 1" to the system critical "PID 1", they have to work perfectly, every time. Needless to say, they don't.

na85 11y ago

The need to replace sysvinit was/is valid but systemd is truly a horrible piece of software. I would argue that systemd has (greatly) increased overall complexity and simply camouflaged it by moving most of the logic out of init scripts (unit files) and into program logic. And then added an http server and binary logs. The original submission title, while editorialized, was pretty apt in my opinion. There really does seem to be a core group of people involved with the GNOME, RedHat, and systemd projects that seem to want to add features just for the sake of adding features, or perhaps so that they have something to claim ownership of. Gnome basically decided that text-basd configuration was too sane and opted for a mix of config files and the Windows Registry (gconf, dconf) which is a hilariously poor design choice. One-size-fits-all doesn't work unless you are Apple and your users will happily swallow your marketing BS and wait in line to buy a new iphone every 2 years. The startup world is rife with the notions of "out with the old, in with the new" and "change for change's sake" so it's not surprising to me that a great deal of HN readers are Poettering apologists. But to me, it sure seems like systemd is just a chance for Poettering and some others to pad their resumés, or else perhaps simply an ego trip. I honestly can't find anything about it that makes me go "hmm, that's a good feature that outweighs all the other negative parts".

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
systemd clicked for me when I started realizing that a lot of its decisions mapped directly to Red Hat business decisions in cloud computing and containers, like their backing of Project Atomic. nspawn, the "stateless" system features through dynamic configuration population, GPT partition discovery deprecating fstab(5), having a big centralized blob journal, the embedded network management (which is mostly useful for container deployments rather than desktops) and NSS extensions, the GNOME system upgrade logic and so on. It's theoretically meant to be general-purpose, but it really shines at virtualized deployments and some desktops because of the multi-seat integration (though logind these days has some power management features that is just as relevant for servers).
- davidstrauss 11y ago
  I don't think Red Hat was the driving force behind systemd's container and VM integration. systemd-nspawn was created to provide rapid testing of systemd, and it was (and, for now, still is) marked as an experimental utility that isn't for production purposes. If you look at many of the early blog posts mentioning systemd and containers/VMs, you'll actually see my work and my company (Pantheon) mentioned more than Red Hat. In more recent posts, you'll see lots of CoreOS influence. Project Atomic isn't working with systemd in any direct, significant way; you won't see much coordination other than in some shared philosophy about a stateless base OS, and even that is more attributable to CoreOS's influence than Red Hat's. I think the influence of Red Hat on systemd is overstated. Of the two perspectives: (1) Red Hat driving everything and (2) Lennart answering mostly to himself, the latter is way more accurate, for better or worse (depending on your opinion of him).

eeperson 11y ago

This is a pretty bad list of issues with systemd. A large portion of criticisms in this list seems to be due to a misunderstanding of the author about what is actually in the systemd git repo. The git repo contains udev and other deamons in addition to the init process. As a result, most of the claims on this page about things going in to the init process are incorrect. If you look the actual release notes they are usually referencing a completely different daemon. For example the line 'pid 1 does DNS' points to a release note about a separate daemon called 'systemd-resolved'. edit: grammar

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digi_owl 11y ago
Well the devs has brought that on themselves by naming the init binary and the overall project the same, and then dumping more and more into a singular code repository.
- eeperson 11y ago
  So its the systemd developers' fault that this is not a very good list of issues?
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    They could have killed the confusion early by either renaming the init (or the project), or keeping the daemons in a different place from the Systemd init code. But instead they lump more and more into a single tree. You can't just grab the Resolved code to look at it, you have to grab the whole Systemd ball and then extract the portion related to Resolved. And will Resolved even function without Systemd sitting as the init?
- davidstrauss 11y ago
  The entire BSD kernel and init system are all in one repository. Are those developers "bringing on" confusion by doing that?

grabcocque 11y ago

Really, is it necessary to have another systemd perma-sulk?

EmanueleAina 11y ago

> * sysv removed http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/NEWS?id=2d1ca11270e66777c90a449096203afebc37ec9c#n1651 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/NEWS?id=2d1... > We have won. Now remove all remains of our defeated enemy as fast as we can. As said in the beginning of the systemd crusade against the UNIX infidels: »You can patch it out.« It is no more there. Are we really complaining that LSB script support has been moved out of PID1 to a separate binary? Wasn't one of the major point for critics that systemd has too much in PID1?

c_rrodriguez 11y ago
Yes..you figured out that you can't win with these people.. whatever you do they are going to complain. They are not interested in any constructive criticism.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU Pot, meet kettle...
  - EmanueleAina 11y ago
    Nope, that's not really the same thing.

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cjsthompson 11y ago

The noble knights of UNIX lore and traditions are at it again. Lo and behold! Armed with the arcane power of ancient spaghetti code shell scripts and logical fallacies, they grep their way through enemy lines to banish the dreaded modernity once and for all.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
ancient spaghetti code shell scripts and logical fallacies Sounds like self-projection. Read this: http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ Then again the fact that you're harping on SysV initscripts when alternatives have been around for ages makes me strongly believe you're trolling.
- cjsthompson 11y ago
  Yes I'm trolling/mocking you anti-systemd retards. That's what Schopenhauer recommends as a strategy against irrational rhetoric (here of the reactionary kind). I couldn't care less for irrational people's reading recommendations. P.S.: "Self-projection" is psychobabble grounded in no science.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    I'm not even anti-systemd, but I can certainly use you as ammunition against systemd proponents if the time ever comes. Thank you kindly for lacking self-control and giving me this opportunity.
    - cjsthompson 11y ago
      No, you just can't recognize that systemd is objectively and clearly superior to every other Linux init system by just about every measure. In fact, systemd is revolutionary in it's own right and that's why it is hated so much. People who actually design operating systems — as opposed to basement-dwelling traditionalists — have expressed admiration for it. Haiku are doing their own systemd inspired init system. And there's been FreeBSD developers talking of doing their own as well. Supposing you're the idiot who wrote that article you linked, the whole "I take no sides" thing is called the middle ground fallacy. Ironic that you should speak of "ape brain" when you either endorse or perhaps wrote such an article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation Oh, and speaking of self-control, aren't you the idiot who couldn't resist replying to my obviously satyrical comment in the first place?

jrk_ 11y ago

> Führerbunker You know that it is these kind of things that makes you look immature and discreditable no matter how valid your arguments are? Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging. I understand that this is a certain kind of humor, but there are many who don't and who will judge you for it.

jamiesonbecker 11y ago

Title is incorrect. Should either be 'sucks - systemd' or 'Systemd is the best example of Suck.'