Lennart Poettering Takes To Battling Systemd Myths

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lennart Poettering Takes To Battling Systemd Myths

Lennart Poettering, the controversial open-source developer behind PulseAudio and systemd among other projects, has written a lengthy blog post as he attempts to battle some myths about his Linux init daemon...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI4NDc

[Laser]

systemd is good, but it is not completely ready yet. Take systemd's user instances: from what I understand, it should be possible to run a user's services/sockets even when he doesn't log in when he is enabled via "loginctl enable-linger $username". But there are currently scripts provided to do that (user-session-units) because lingering doesn't seem to work. When you try to start a systemd user instance on a headless machine, you get errors because the display variable is not set, might be a dbus issue, but user-session-units has a service file that works around that. So, from my impressions, it is not feature-complete yet. Not a biggie though as it already handles much more than any init system I ever saw and makes administration really easy IMHO. TBH, I dunno why you would want to go back to a classic syslog with all the comfort journalctl provides. Or managing your startup dependencies yourself.

[curaga]

*grabs some popcorn*

[uid313]

Didn't mention that systemd is closely tied to udev and journald and that there is a dependency there and people are forced to use it.

[Teho]

Didn't mention that systemd is closely tied to udev and journald and that there is a dependency there and people are forced to use it.

Standalone udev is supported and he did mention that in the blog post. Nothing depends on Journal so how would that "force" anyone to use systemd?

In fact, many of these binaries[1] are separated out so nicely, that they are very useful outside of systemd, too. -- [1] For example, systemd-detect-virt, systemd-tmpfiles, systemd-udevd are.

[bachinchi]

That guy screwed up udev.

[Ericg]

Didn't mention that systemd is closely tied to udev and journald and that there is a dependency there and people are forced to use it.

systemd depends on udev and journal.
journal depends on systemd
udev depends on....the kernel.

End of dependencies. If you want to build udev, yes, you have to pull in the systemd sources BUT you dont have to build systemd with udev. Just pass the appropriate configure flag and the only thing you'll have is udev.

The journal is only force-enabled, yes, but it doesn't take exclusive access. I have both journald and syslog running right now on this Arch Laptop. You know what I had to do?

pacman -S syslog-ng
systemctl enable syslog-ng
systemctl start syslog-ng

And thats it. Anything that gets sent to the journal is automatically (with zero configuration on my end) passed along to syslog. If you dont want to use the journal than you just dont invoke journalctl and you just cat the log files from /var/log like always.


I know someone will make the comment about Lennart saying he wanted to eventually get rid of udev-without-systemd. Yes, he made the comment, you know what the key-word there is though? "EVENTUALLY." He didn't say "2013." He didn't say "Next release." Or anything else. He said eventually. Which I don't really see that as that big of a problem, its only natural that a project leader would want his project to grow and be successful. (Un)Fortunately there can only be 1 init system in place at any given time on one machine so systemd being ultimately successful and being the standard -would- mean, logically, that sysV and upstart die.

[asdx]

Then, the way our project is handled (i.e. maintaining much of the core OS in a single git repository) is much closer to the BSD model (which is a true UNIX, unlike Linux) of doing things (where most of the core OS is kept in a single CVS/SVN repository) than things on Linux ever where.

I wonder what this guy is smoking.

This has to be the most shittiest things I've ever read about systemd or any project, WTF?

Hey Lennart, are you going to merge Qt also? and Emacs? and Xorg, etc?

WTF.

What a crappy way of managing a project.

[Ericg]

I wonder what this guy is smoking.

This has to be the most shittiest things I've ever read about systemd or any project, WTF?

Hey Lennart, are you going to merge Qt also? and Emacs? and Xorg, etc?

WTF.

What a crappy way of managing a project.

He's actually right. Go look at the Net/Open/Free BSD's source. The kernel and the low-level utilities aren't shared, each group has their own kernel and their own low-level utilities that take the best features that their individual kernels offers and uses them. The middle tier, like ssh, and the higher tier like xorg are shared sure. But the low-level stuff? Group-specific.

[asdx]

He's actually right. Go look at the Net/Open/Free BSD's source. The kernel and the low-level utilities aren't shared, each group has their own kernel and their own low-level utilities that take the best features that their individual kernels offers and uses them. The middle tier, like ssh, and the higher tier like xorg are shared sure. But the low-level stuff? Group-specific.

Yeah and? Just because that's how it's done in BSD land it means it's the "right and only way" to do things, and it needs to be the same way in Linux too?

Give me a break.