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Systemd Continued Commanding Linux Systems In 2015

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  • Systemd Continued Commanding Linux Systems In 2015

    Phoronix: Systemd Continued Commanding Linux Systems In 2015

    This year Ubuntu switched over to using systemd in place of Upstart, other distributions have also decided to take advantage of systemd, this project hosted its first conference, and the systemd feature-set continued to expand...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    And this year I switched to Gentoo.

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    • #3
      Can someone explain to me why systemd is hated? I never had any problems with it... OpenRC on the other hand... (but then again I didn't have that many problems with OpenRC either, not so much that I'd bother switching to systemd)

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      • #4
        Originally posted by rabcor View Post
        Can someone explain to me why systemd is hated? I never had any problems with it... OpenRC on the other hand... (but then again I didn't have that many problems with OpenRC either, not so much that I'd bother switching to systemd)
        Not to start a flame war but it mostly seems to stem from bad logic and ignorance.

        One viable reason is journalctl and how it stores data, which causes a lot of corruption in the case of a panicked system.

        Another is its large integration of various services at a rather critical section of code. Although, this isnt such a good argument on Linux where one very minor mistake in any driver (such as an input driver) can cause it to go down.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by rabcor View Post
          Can someone explain to me why systemd is hated? I never had any problems with it... OpenRC on the other hand... (but then again I didn't have that many problems with OpenRC either, not so much that I'd bother switching to systemd)
          It is hated because it is hard to avoid. It forces people to change distro. There is a sentiment that it is being pushed on users and systemd affects a lot of packages. Maybe systemd is not bad from a technical standpoint, but it's a huge codebase and that's one reason not to like it.

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          • #6
            From what I've heard, sysadmins actually like it better than the other init systems. It's more stable, more useful, more reliable. But as freedom said, it's also becoming a monolithic piece of software, and Linux aficionados don't like monolithic software.

            But I think what you said is wrong computerquip, journalctl is indeed storing in a binary format that could be a problem, but from what I've understood, it is just logging in another data system and the old data system is still functional.

            Edit: I'm really not sure about all the facts, so please correct me if I'm wrong (although if systemd was that bad, we probably wouldn't have it on most of the top distributions)
            Here is one article I've found about systemd controversy: http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/08/ab...ntroversy.html
            Last edited by Creak; 29 December 2015, 04:59 PM.

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            • #7
              managing cgroups earlier was a pain. systemd takes care of all of that. however at times i do believe that it is trying to be much more than it should be. like they built in some networking stuff like dhcp client etc. Thing is all of RedHat's revenue comes from server market, with the increasing adoption of containers and cloud, they want to "streamline" stuff as much as possible.

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              • #8
                Some people have problem with systemd and wish it was easier to opt out from it.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by rabcor View Post
                  Can someone explain to me why systemd is hated? I never had any problems with it... OpenRC on the other hand... (but then again I didn't have that many problems with OpenRC either, not so much that I'd bother switching to systemd)
                  There's a number of reasons, many already mentioned.

                  People see it as over-reaching in many areas. At it's core it is an init system designed to replace bash scripts as a method of handling services. But taken as a whole, the whole of what systemd does (and now I mean systemd as the umbrella project) it's doing a lot more than just being an init system. There's modules for networking, handling logons, hardware discovery and a whole host of other things. People see this as being against the Unix maxim that programs should do one thing and do that one thing well. Systemd is doing many things, some of them tightly integrated with each other. Though the counter-argument is that systemd is very modular, you can if you wish just have the init system if you went to some trouble.

                  Then there's the binary logs. If you can't boot your system, and you have to recover by, for example, booting a liveCD, your boot media has to support systemd to interrogate those logs. Those who argue this tend to omit that systemd supports writing to text logs (though this has to be configured).

                  I've seen arguments bemoaning the policies of systemd regarding things like mounting disks. If a mount fails at boot, by default, systemd will prevent the OS from booting (again, can be configured to behave otherwise).

                  As has already been pointed out, it's also hard to avoid. Many of the bigger distros have adopted it. People think that choice in Linux is an important thing, and choosing to not use systemd is becoming rather difficult. You have to either go to great lengths to rid your system of systemd (there's guides on the likes of Debian and Arch as to how to remove it). Or you have to use a distro that's chosen not to use it, the obvious choices being Gentoo and Slackware (with some other fringe distros made by people whose only motivation for starting a distro seems to be anger at systemd such as deuvan).

                  Another big reason is because the principle developer behind it is Poettering, and people love to hate him. Many people despise his previous work such as pulseaudio which has, or certainly had, a reputation as being rather resource hungry (it took up about 5% of cpu time on the N900 which is rather a lot just for something that just handles sound). I see this last point as being the main reason for a lot of people. There seems to be an almost religious zealotry towards hating systemd, and it's likely examples of that are incoming in this thread.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by freedom View Post

                    It is hated because it is hard to avoid. It forces people to change distro. There is a sentiment that it is being pushed on users and systemd affects a lot of packages. Maybe systemd is not bad from a technical standpoint, but it's a huge codebase and that's one reason not to like it.
                    You mean a huge hard to avoid codebase like Xorg, Linux Kernel, Glibc, GCC, ... I fail to see how this is an argument. The systemd project simply hosts a lot of stuff (most UNIXes btw. host all their stuff in one large repository), so the huge codebase does not even compile to one huge binary (like the kernel does, btw). Also there is another misunderstanding. systemd on its own cannot affect other packages. Other projects upstream might decide though, that some feature of systemd makes their life so much easier that they actively decide to make use of it and even depend on it. That only means that systemd exposes a lot of useful features.

                    In fact nobody is forced to use it at all. People can use their software without systemd. They can reimplement the features or life without them. What people cannot expect is to have other people develop run their projects with the extra effort of going without useful interfaces and features that actually simplify things and solve problems, only so that they can cater to some vocal minority that has some animosity against a certain project that is moving the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem forward.

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