Systemd Is Now One Year Old; Why You Should Use It

[Chewi]

Isn't D-Bus hate getting a bit old now? It's obviously here to stay. I'm not clear on the reasons against it. Breaking "everything is a file" is probably one of them. If it were that easy to map it onto a filesystem, surely someone would have done it by now? I think speed was another but I don't know if that's still an issue. What do you propose instead?

[MùPùF]

You forget "pardon".

oh, this one is often used in the UK

[radiomist]

Systemd support in Archlinux is good, add e4rat and is easy to get fast booting procces.

[energyman]

While I admit that it's not as modern as systemd, I still really like Gentoo's OpenRC and I think it does tick a fair few of those boxes. It's a shame the original developer abandoned it because I'm sure many of these features would have appeared if he hadn't. There has been talk of Gentoo moving to systemd but in the shorter term, it needs to stabilise OpenRC and get rid of the ageing baselayout-1. This isn't long away now.

openrc is still maintained and what features are missing?

[mendieta]

1. It's a shame to see the latest systemd package I can get for Ubuntu is systemd-19, when Debian Experimental already has systemd-25.
2. To force Ubuntu to use systemd, they'll need a punch in the face. Not a real one, but a figurative one resulting from systemd + normal kernel being faster to boot than upstart + ureadahead. Upstart is already beaten, but ureadahead is a tough one: Fedora 15 is close, but still it can't match the Ubuntu boot speed.

Interesting, I was thinking of testing systemd in Kubuntu Natty. Are you using systemd frome here?

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/systemd

[eikenberry]

Isn't D-Bus hate getting a bit old now? It's obviously here to stay. I'm not clear on the reasons against it. Breaking "everything is a file" is probably one of them. If it were that easy to map it onto a filesystem, surely someone would have done it by now? I think speed was another but I don't know if that's still an issue. What do you propose instead?

I think most of the hate is coming from server people. D-bus is of no use on the server, but it is another thing that can break.

[Chewi]

openrc is still maintained and what features are missing?

I didn't say it wasn't still maintained, I fixed a couple of bugs myself the other day, but it seems to have lost momentum since Roy left. Having said that, I still think it's fairly feature-complete, it's just lacking some of the modern extras that systemd has like a D-Bus interface, path-based activation (inotify) and PolicyKit integration.

[curaga]

Isn't D-Bus hate getting a bit old now? It's obviously here to stay. I'm not clear on the reasons against it. Breaking "everything is a file" is probably one of them. If it were that easy to map it onto a filesystem, surely someone would have done it by now? I think speed was another but I don't know if that's still an issue. What do you propose instead?

What's a couple daemon deps for the init between friends?
What's another daemon to be started at boot, taking resources.

[Chewi]

What's a couple daemon deps for the init between friends?
What's another daemon to be started at boot, taking resources.

That didn't answer my last question. Sure, eikenberry is right, it's probably not needed on a server, but clearly developers have seen a need for it on the desktop, a need that has outweighed saving CPU time and memory on ever more powerful machines. I actually installed D-Bus on a Pentium 120 once because I wanted to use Bluez 4 on it. The overall performance wasn't going to break any records but it was still very usable.

It's a shame that systemd does require D-Bus rather than making it optional as some server distros will inevitably find themselves forced to use it but really, what are we talking about here? Current usage on my desktop machine is about 20MB/1MB virtual/real RAM usage for the system daemon. On a server, it may be less. As for CPU time, it probably won't consume any after booting and how often is your server going to do that?

[not.sure]

What's a couple daemon deps for the init between friends?
What's another daemon to be started at boot, taking resources.

More than resource usage, I'd be worried about stability. People going on a feature bonanza for something critical to boot a system is probably not a good thing.
Unless of course a concrete feature helps distros to avoid complexity and unstability elsewhere.