Ubuntu To Switch To systemd

GuerillaRadio writes "Following the decision for Debian to switch to the systemd init system, Ubuntu founder and SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth has posted a blog entry indicating that Ubuntu will now follow in this decision. 'Nevertheless, the decision is for systemd, and given that Ubuntu is quite centrally a member of the Debian family, that's a decision we support. I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously.'"

Comments

Good...?

[Kagetsuki]

I think it's good Shuttleworth was able to suck up his pride and go along with this decision to prevent fragmentation. I do however call the original decision slightly into question, but that's only because I've gotten sort of used to upstart. Hopefully anything good that was implemented in upstart but was not in systemd will make its way over.

Re:Good...?

[fishybell]

Having switched from System V to upstart to systemd I can safely say that yes, systemd is better for a full server or desktop OS. It has better reporting tools, it has more fine grained control, and it's fast. The trade off is complexity and size. There are many computer systems that the cost of switching to systemd will not bear fruit for a very long time (ex. embedded), but for servers and desktops that time has arrived.

Learn to love systemd; it's here to stay and for good reason.

Re:Good...?

[Billly Gates]

The bad is is SysV not event driven.

This might be ok for servers but lets say you have a laptop with Ubuntu. You are on a network and it goes to sleep at work. You grab it and head to the airport for a trip and the laptop wakes up elsewhere. All of your SYSV scripts to do things like pass settings to daemons relating to network and Samba get messed up.

With an event driven system you tell it to do things based on conditions or events such as your laptop going to sleep and waking up on a different network as an example. You can use SystemD to re-initialize itself not just on startup but when things happen with this new ability. A hacking attempt on a server, an unplanned reboot, or anything else

The bad about SystemD compared to upstart and Apple's or Sun's event driven systems:
- no text files
- binary reporting
- quite complicated compared to other event driven systems like the older upstart

System admins hate systemD as it does not follow the Unix philosophy of text files and now awk, sed, grep, or perl to batch jobs :-(

Some also is resistance to change as many unix old timers hated anything new by Sun and did not want to relearn writing new scripts all over again. But, this tries to solve a problem like the laptop example but at the cost of complexity and non integration.

Re:Whats wrong with init?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I know nothing about this software but I'm gonna bitch, complain and sling shit at it anyway. How dare they move my cheese!"

- Typical Slashtard

like conceeding that air is necessary

[Virtucon]

I'm sorry but the systemd thing is really, really a mole hill when it comes to Ubuntu embracing things. From my perspective it doesn't matter what init scheme you use as long as it does it efficiently and allows you to augment things when you need to. Shit most Linux users don't even know what their distro's choice is for init scripting! Cripes you'd think that folks would have thought that the Vatican was now allowing electronic balloting and using Green Friendly e-smoke for electing the Pope or something with all this nonsensical whoopla.

Re:like conceeding that air is necessary

[raxx7]

Users rightfully do not care about what init system they use, as long as it works.
But making it work requires time and effort from some people. And we don't live in a world of infinite resources.

By announcing they're switching Ubuntu from Upstart to systemd, Ubuntu aligned themselves with the majority of the developer comunity and Ubuntu reduced the ammount of effort they and others developers have to put in to make it work efficiently as you said.
Ubuntu will not have to write and debug Upstart configuration files for services, they can just the share the same systemd files as Debian.
GUbuntu and KUbuntu developers will have less trouble to make Gnome Shell and KWin, which are moving towards somewhat depending on systemd, work on a Ubuntu derived distribution.

And that means they can actually spend time fixing other stuff.

Embedded uses something different anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think very much embedded stuff will ever use systemd. Most use System V or Busybox init or spin their own simpler version. If someone is using a general purpose install like Ubuntu for embedded work, they're doing it wrong right from the start.

Re:Embedded uses something different anyway

[dalias]

This is a fallacy. A shell script running on a non-bloated shell (e.g. Busybox ash) consumes less than 50k of dirty pages per instance. It would take at least 20-30 such scripts running to even come close to rivaling systemd's memory usage, and that's not even counting other resources systemd is consuming.

systemd violates the UNIX philosophy

[bzipitidoo]

The philosophy of modularity. Tools are many and small and simple, do one thing and do it well. But then, the Linux kernel also violates this principle.

There's also this seeming drive to make more tools dependent on systemd. Does udev really need to depend on systemd?

Wayland may be an example of an approach more in line with the UNIX philosophy. X has a lot of baggage that has become useless over the years. Lot of basic graphics functionality has moved into specialized graphics hardware.

Re:systemd violates the UNIX philosophy

[broken_chaos]

Wayland is actually one of the "new Linux" things that I'm interested in. I'm not getting rid of X anytime soon, but when Wayland has the tools, hardware support, etc. I need, I'll likely switch to it without any fuss. (For the curious, I use i3 as a window manager, and there's just no equivalent compositor for Wayland yet. None of my applications are GTK+3 or QT5, either, so I'd be using the X compatibility layer for essentially everything too.)

But systemd I really am not fond of. It's not an issue of being different (though that is some part of it), so much as the way it dictates so much of how you use things. It seems to touch every single part of your system on an ongoing basis, rather than just booting the system and staying out of the way. I sincerely doubt there would be as much distaste for it if it was just the init system part, rather than stuffing everything else in too.

Why I don't like systemd:

[wonkey_monkey]

service is a word. systemctl isn't, and it's 50% more characters to type, too.

why not the new thing?

[dAzED1]

There's this new thing called "init.d" which makes things really simple - you can start a system up and step through things, and though the boot takes 5 seconds instead of 1 second, that isn't really a problem.

Once I read the original post about systemd, and all the other let's-invent-a-problem-to-fix nonsense surrounding init.d, I literally hung up my hat and stopped being a syseng. I was a unix guy starting in 93, so it was probably time anyway, but it was the straw that broke my back, as it were.As mentioned, the central responsibility of an init system is to bring up userspace. And a good init system does that fast. I especially "loved" this line: As mentioned, the central responsibility of an init system is to bring up userspace. And a good init system does that fast. No. A good init system does it reliably, with no drama and no politics. A good init system allows one to easily determine the state of a system, and doesn't assume things like GUIs and such. A good unix init system does all this with commands which can be piped and parsed easily with grep and awk - two things the original post about systemd actually complains about. The idea that a unix person would complain about grep and awk was so mind-boggling to me that...well, I just hung up the hat. You did all this nonsense, just to save a few seconds? Because what, the only thing linux is used for, is laptops? Meh.

Nuts, upstart syntax is so easy

[exabrial]

I really like upstart. The scripts are stupidly easy to write and understand, and the syntax is plain english.

Actually that's the only reason I like upstart. Maybe with Ubuntu onboard with systemd we can get an alternate, easier-to-use syntax than the default systemd.

Re:

[Dishevel]

The real truth is you are completely unlovable.