Ubuntu To Switch To systemd

Good...? by Kagetsuki · 2014-02-14 04:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

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...? by fishybell · 2014-02-14 04:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Re:Good...? by serviscope_minor · 2014-02-14 05:01 · Score: 2

Can you enlighten us?
Mostly, unless I've needed to hack something I've ignored the init system more or less completely. SYSV seemed to work OK (never noticed any obvious problems) and on Arch it used to be really rather fast to boot as well.
I genuinely do not know what is bad about wrong with SYSV and what is better about systemd.
There seems to be a lot of hot air in general and people arguing from a point of ignorance. You seem to have looked into it. What's the beef?

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Re:Good...? by s.petry · 2014-02-14 05:17 · Score: 3, Informative

I am with you, I never saw a reason to get rid of SYSV. The reason Linux started pushing is based on the same Logic Sun had to go away from it. A master daemon which monitors all services and their current states, restart when necessary, etc... The Sun implementation took a bit of getting used to, but in reality the daemon used XML files which contained mostly SH scripts. It was still hackable, which is why SYSV stuck around for so long. When something does not work, write a new SH script and stick it in init.
The Linux implementation is not as straight forward as Sun's implementation which to me says a lot. RH6 went to systemd and I hated it. Cryptic, not hackable, and simply a pain in the ass to customize unless you run everything in legacy mode which is still SYSV. The alleged better logging did not exist, and was much harder to access than "set -x" in an init script.
The overlord daemon is an advantage, previously we all used monitoring scripts to do things for us. The system now has it built in. I never saw an issue with writing restart options into BigBrother, Nagios, etc.. so don't save much with this small feature. In the grand scheme of things, I lose a lot of flexibility with this system. So most of my custom tools, code, and scripts will run in legacy mode.

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-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Re:Good...? by fishybell · 2014-02-14 05:30 · Score: 5, Informative

System V has a scrict sense of a run level. For example, if you want a full desktop, run level 5 is often used, for a headless server, run level 3. What if you have a box that is headless most of the time, but you want to be able to run a full desktop sometimes? With System V you would change from run level 3 to run level 5 which would, depending on implimentation, stop and start services that are needed by both. Systemd instead has the concept of targets. Your full desktop target would have the headless server target as a dependency, and starting the full desktop would only run what isn't already running. You typically also have individual sevices that have dependencies. For example, you'd want your dhcp server to wait to start until the network has come online. In System V you have to define network as a number and make sure everything that depends on it has a bigger number and everything it depends on to have a smaller number. systemd's dependency model is also smart enough to start processes in parallel.
All of that is just the most exposed part of systemd (to me at least). It also supplants other processes such as xinetd and udev. Instead of having three different ways to start processes based on system events (startup, port connection, hardware event) you have a single system to manage all three. It can get complicated (wasn't udev already complicated?) but the consistency is worth it.
To keep all the consitency systemd provides a series of functions and magic variables. By magic variables I mean you set a list dependencies, which IMHO is less magic than the chkconfig comment lines in a typical System V init script. Both the magic variables and functions mean your typical service initaliation script is 10 lines instead of 100. While they may not be as obvious what's going on (a System V script is self-contained and can be ran on it's own) it is once you've become familiar with them.

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Re:Good...? by caseih · 2014-02-14 06:01 · Score: 2

RH6 went to systemd? I don't see systemd on any of my RHEL6 or CentOS6 machines.
I am running a RHEL7 beta box, and it does have systemd. And it's not really that cryptic or unhackable. In fact getting a new daemon installed and running is far simpler than with sysv. You don't have to write an init script. Just create a simple ini file, and away it goes. Because there's no init script to screw up, things are easier to debug. If you can run the daemon from the command line and it's happy, then you know it will work with systemd. And the logging facility is much better since the daemon can just write to standard out or standard err if it wants to, and everything is captured to the log (and normal syslog still works).
Yes if you resist working with Systemd, and work against it, your life is going to be a lot more difficult. And I used to think as you do about it, but after working with it a bit more, I can see how it is a better system. It's still too opaque for my tastes, but in practice it works very well.
My only concern is how deeply it ties into the Linux Kernel, which means that we're losing the freedom to use other Unix operating systems once we tie to systemd. Competition is always good but this is going to really squeeze FreeBSD (and to a lesser extend OpenBSD). Gnome 3 is Linux only because of this. We'll have to see where this goes I guess.
Re:Good...? by inhuman_4 · 2014-02-14 06:10 · Score: 2

not bear fruit for a very long time (ex. embedded)
Don't be so quick to count embedded guys out yet. While there isn't much in systemd itself, but as I understand it it will integrate well with kdbus. And kdbus (I think) plans to support QNX style "yield CPU to destination" type message passing. Which is a very nice feature for realtime systems.
Re:Good...? by Kremmy · 2014-02-14 06:22 · Score: 2

The tradeoff is complexity and size. I've got to say, I still don't buy it, this entire concept of requiring more resources to do the same job and yet somehow being more scalable to a degree that makes the trade-off worthwhile. If you have to upgrade your system to see the benefits (embedded systems are no slouches these days, look at any ARM tablet specs) then those benefits are seriously questionable.
Re:Good...? by kthreadd · 2014-02-14 06:28 · Score: 2

Really? Wikipedia says otherwise.
Re:Good...? by RabidReindeer · 2014-02-14 06:34 · Score: 3, Interesting

One of the biggest selling points of Linux for me was that its log and config files were text files.
When I first started working with OS/2, one of my principal frustrations was that each and every IBM program product had its own proprietary config and log file format that could only be accessed using a product-specific utility. In Linux, the standard text utilities were all that were needed, and there are text utilities for almost every conceiveable way to search or update those files.
While there are certain things I like about systemctl and the newer Linux logging manager, their departure from this inherent simplicity disturbs me. It's aking to the trend to provide "improved" systems like Gnome3 or Windows 8 where your gains are offset by your losses.
Even a relatively open binary system like OLE/COM turned out to be more trouble than it was worth for me. I'd rather not throw out the good with the bad.
Re:Good...? by Billly+Gates · 2014-02-14 07:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Re:Good...? by DikSeaCup · 2014-02-14 07:09 · Score: 2

Have you ever tried logging into a box at runlevel 3 and typing "startx"?
On the super rare occasions where I'd need a GUI at the console of a system, this would work well enough for me (assuming all of the proper packages were installed).
A regular practice for me was to do installs as "minimal desktop" and then during the final configuration, change runlevel to 3 in inittab.

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I talk about stuff.
Re:Good...? by nabsltd · 2014-02-14 07:20 · Score: 3, Informative

In System V you have to define network as a number and make sure everything that depends on it has a bigger number and everything it depends on to have a smaller number. systemd's dependency model is also smart enough to start processes in parallel.
If only systemd were really "smart enough", it would be great. Unfortunately, if you have a sevice that needs another service 100% functional before it can run, systemd has no way to describe that in the dependency files nor to test it.
All systemd uses to define a "running" service is that a process doesn't throw an immediate error upon startup. And, that's all it can ever have, unless the service is specially coded to be systemd-aware or does something like create a file in /var/run after it has fully initialized, and the dependency can be written using file existence. This really isn't any different in SysV, but at least there I could trivially edit the startup script of the dependent service and add some sort of test.
Because there is no way to test every combination of services, there is no way to reliably create systemd dependency files that will always work. Because of that, we get things like rc.local running before other services have started completely.
Re:Good...? by amorsen · 2014-02-14 07:25 · Score: 5, Informative

Indeed, journalctl is probably what I dislike the most about the current systemd stack. For one thing it is slow with full text search in large log files -- it is reasonably fast if you use the built-in column-specific search, but just running fgrep on it is not really feasible. In contrast, fgrep is ridiculously fast on modern systems as long as your log files stay below a few gigabytes in size. Also, the output of journalctl changes (mostly for the better) when you use it with pipes, which can be quite surprising.
The other major problem with systemd is how difficult it is to debug boot failures. It is quite annoying when an fstab which was correct with upstart results in silent boot failure with systemd.

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Re:Good...? by Bacon+Bits · 2014-02-14 07:35 · Score: 4, Interesting

Yes, and you have to understand that that only works because your DE of choice has bent over backwards to make sure all it's dependencies are running and functional when you try to start it. That is to say, startx has to duplicate functionality of init because init is too stupid or too unreliable to be able to do it for your DE.
This issue can be generalized to any significantly complex application. That means you already have a half dozen "init systems" working on your systems. They're all independent (even though they maybe should know about each other), and you can't manage them universally (even though you might want to fire things off with system level events, like restarting a service if it crashes), and you certainly can't be sure you're not stepping on each others' toes.
Essentially: a large enough number of people noticed that the same features for starting and managing processes were getting implemented over, and over, and over. They realized that these functions belong in the init role -- because only init has the authority and knowledge required to not screw it up -- but that sysv-init didn't have the capability to do any of that.
All this began to happen perhaps 10 years ago, when other operating systems (e.g., Windows, which has had service dependencies and crash recovery since Windows 2000) showed what a more feature-complete init system was capable of.
At this point these "why do we even need a new init system?" questions are like someone watching I-40 getting repaved in the 1970s and asking "why do we even need Interstates?"

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The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Re:Good...? by dreamchaser · 2014-02-14 07:47 · Score: 2

CentOS 6 doesn't. I know Centos doesn't track RHEL 100%, but that's a significant difference...
Incorrect, or you're just making shit up.
This is relevant to the discussion. Operative section:

Starting with version 6, however, CentOS has turned to a new and better init system – Upstart. Upstart is faster than System V init because it starts services simultaneously rather than one by one in a certain order. Upstart is also more flexible and robust, because it is event-based.

So, you were saying?
Re:Good...? by JesseMcDonald · 2014-02-14 09:41 · Score: 3, Informative

Unfortunately, if you have a sevice that needs another service 100% functional before it can run, systemd has no way to describe that in the dependency files nor to test it. All systemd uses to define a "running" service is that a process doesn't throw an immediate error upon startup. And, that's all it can ever have, unless the service is specially coded to be systemd-aware or does something like create a file in /var/run after it has fully initialized, and the dependency can be written using file existence.
That isn't true. Putting aside the systemd-specific sd_notify() API for reporting just how completely the service has been initialized, and the socket activation model which allows other services to connect while startup is still in progress, systemd also supports traditional "forking" daemons which complete their initialization before the main process exits. You can also use the ExecStartPre and ExecStartPost fields to inject arbitrary commands into the startup process separate from the daemon itself.
The best case short of actual systemd integration is that the service already does the right thing with the fork-and-exit model, so that it's ready to be used before any other services are started which depend on it. But even if that isn't the case there are ways to deal with it under systemd, up to and including custom shell scripts for the really complex cases.

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"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Re:Good...? by JesseMcDonald · 2014-02-14 10:00 · Score: 2

The bad about SystemD compared to upstart and Apple's or Sun's event driven systems: ... - no text files
What do you mean by that? The database used by journald may be binary (with the ability to export to text), but systemd unit files are simple text files with an INI-style layout. There are some other systemd configuration files with different formats for historical reasons, but to my knowledge all of them are still text.

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"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Re:Good...? by RabidReindeer · 2014-02-14 10:50 · Score: 2

Well good then that the ini files for SystemD is text and that you can export the textlogs from the logger.
Exporting isn't the same as processing in place. And the other day, in fact, I ran into an issue where messages that I expect to be able to "tail" out of the older log simply couldn't be found.
The systemd authors have already admitted that there are certain functions that the older script-based ini's could provide that their strictly-declarative system at present cannot. Having text formatted files is useful but not being excessively restricted in what the text can do is also important.
Re:Good...? by Omicron32 · 2014-02-14 11:00 · Score: 2

> 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 :-( Firstly, it's systemd. I'm not sure where you're getting the capital from. Secondly, generalise much? I'm a long-time Linux system admin and I can't wait until systemd filters down to server distros like CentOS and Ubuntu LTS. It will make my job a whole lot easier.

Xubuntu 13.04 Live CD is already running systemd by Kremmy · 2014-02-14 04:42 · Score: 2

Maybe the linux distributions should stop pulling an AppleSoft and start maintaining their shit instead of rewriting it again.

Whats wrong with init? by Viol8 · 2014-02-14 04:47 · Score: 2

People talk about parallel start up , well you can do that with init anyway. Its it smarter with dependencies or is it just change for the sake of it? I'm really not thrilled with the prospect of yet another config language, there are quite enough already.

Re:Whats wrong with init? by EmperorArthur · 2014-02-14 05:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

Lets face it, sysV init is complicated. Well, the theory behind the old linear start from init script 00 and move to init script 99 isn't, but the modern implementations and the scripts themselves are complicated. I mean you're doing dependency checking and a whole bunch of other things in bash scripts. Compare that to a systemd service file, which is overall nice and readable. So, part of it is factoring out the logic from the variables. The other big thing is bash and the tools used by init scripts are like using a sledgehammer to tap in a finishing nail.
I'm not going to say that systemd is perfect. I like the "unix" way which is to use small units that do one thing well instead of anything. That's part of the reason I see bash init scripts as too much for the job. Unfortunately, the systemd authors look like they want to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Well, everything that they can't just port to kernel space that is. But that's the thing, Linux is a Monolithic kernel. Like it or not, the "Linux" way is to have one uber optimized thing with modules to handle everything.
In the end, I just really like the ease of use of service files. Oh, and the stupidly fast boot time on my laptop is really nice. People who say boot times don't matter aren't living in the real world.

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Re:Whats wrong with init? by causality · 2014-02-14 05:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

"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
Knowledge of the new software is a separate (easier to cheaply ridicule, stay classy) question. The issue with systemd: it reeks of a solution looking for a problem.

If the existing init systems were causing widespread grief I'd be much more receptive to it. So would just about anyone currently questioning systemd's rapid adoption. Right now the reason for installing it is "everyone else is adopting it as the new standard and it will be increasingly difficult to go against that standard." That's not the best of selling points. It's not like "wow all these problems and limitations I had been experiencing will finally go away!" like you get with truly sensible and evolutionary changes.

If you think that shouldn't matter to anyone, you could explain why you think so. In the meantime, please make an effort to understand the viewpoint of those who disagree with you. Then you stand a real chance of actually addressing the issue, or at least of not embarassing yourself with smug hand-waving and knee-jerk dismissals based on your annoyance that everyone doesn't already agree with you.

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It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Re:Whats wrong with init? by causality · 2014-02-14 05:36 · Score: 2

Knowledge of the new software is a separate (easier to cheaply ridicule, stay classy) question. The issue with systemd: it reeks of a solution looking for a problem.
Based on having used it or because your cheese got moved? All these distros wouldn't be adopting it if what you say is true, especially Debian. Get back to me when you have a real argument not cliches.
So you prefer to repeat yourself rather than address the real root cause of the remaining resistance to systemd? You definitely missed an opportunity there.

I said I question systemd's adoption. I didn't say I was against it, nor did I say that other people shouldn't use it. Even that offends you, and you resort to a form of "everyone else is doing it!" (the antithesis of thinking) to justify yourself. This is why you are smug.

I reasonably put a valid question to you and you weren't prepared for that at all. That's a shame, because if systemd is truly so wonderful, its adoption could only be harmed by advocates like you.

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It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Re:Whats wrong with init? by fishybell · 2014-02-14 05:39 · Score: 3, Informative

Yes, you can do parallel startup with System V. You also can make a systemd init process that doesn't do anything in parallel.
Yes, systemd is smarter with dependencies in the sense that it has dependencies and not a numered list. Yes, you can have a System V script that manages it's own dependencies, but because you can do an infinite number of things with System V scripts many people have tried. I've ran across dozens of System V scripts that are hundreds of lines long even without couting the standard ". /etc/init.d/functions" size, which, on my system, is almost 600 lines long. Systemd simplies this by having a much larger library of functions and uses the presumption that you'll never call a script without using systemd to manage it. No longer does every script have to define a start, stop, restart, condrestart, status function; it's handled by systemd. No longer do you have to do checks for your PID file; it's handled by systemd. No longer do you have to make sure your script will always run after another script even if that script's chkconfig number changed; it's handled by systemd.
In the end, yes, it's another config language you'll have to learn, but it's worth it.

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Re:Whats wrong with init? by tlhIngan · 2014-02-14 05:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

Lets face it, sysV init is complicated. Well, the theory behind the old linear start from init script 00 and move to init script 99 isn't, but the modern implementations and the scripts themselves are complicated. I mean you're doing dependency checking and a whole bunch of other things in bash scripts. Compare that to a systemd service file, which is overall nice and readable. So, part of it is factoring out the logic from the variables. The other big thing is bash and the tools used by init scripts are like using a sledgehammer to tap in a finishing nail.
I'm not going to say that systemd is perfect. I like the "unix" way which is to use small units that do one thing well instead of anything. That's part of the reason I see bash init scripts as too much for the job. Unfortunately, the systemd authors look like they want to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Well, everything that they can't just port to kernel space that is. But that's the thing, Linux is a Monolithic kernel. Like it or not, the "Linux" way is to have one uber optimized thing with modules to handle everything.
Well, the BIG problem is maintenance. SysV scripts have both a S and K variant on when to run when switching levels, and you can bet very few people have it properly set up if you do switch levels. Enough so that switching levels is fraught with danger - you can probably start at level 1 (single user), and switch to 3, 4, or 5. Maybe you can get back to 1 because the extra demons get killed. Maybe.
In the end, it's bit of a maintenance hassle, and while completely understandable, it's a nightmare.
In fact, I'm guessing most utilities don't even bother handling the case - you just reboot and forget about it.
After all, computers are good at doing stuff automatically - so stuff like maintaining which services should run at which runlevels should be automated - the init can figure out what it needs to start, what it needs to kill and the order based on dependencies. All the user needs to do is select what needs to run at what runlevel, and the tool does the rest.
Then there are the various hacks to SysV - PID files (if so many tools need to know the daemon PID, why not have init actually do that work than requiring every script to do it manually?), the fact that state tracking isn't really in the system, and if you need services to relaunch on failure within limits, there ought to be a way to do it without requiring a trip to /etc/inittab to specify that fact.
Re:Whats wrong with init? by causality · 2014-02-14 06:29 · Score: 3, Interesting

Well, the BIG problem is maintenance. SysV scripts have both a S and K variant on when to run when switching levels, and you can bet very few people have it properly set up if you do switch levels. Enough so that switching levels is fraught with danger - you can probably start at level 1 (single user), and switch to 3, 4, or 5. Maybe you can get back to 1 because the extra demons get killed. Maybe.
I know what you mean. I've used Linux systems that were set up that way, and it's messy and a bit of a nuisance to make sure the system is really going to do what I think it's going to do.

Personally I'm a long-time Gentoo user and my system runs OpenRC. Have you ever used it? It eliminates the sources of confusion you illustrate there. It's neat and it's simple and it works and I can forget that it's there. That's what I like about it. There's nothing I want it to do that it doesn't already implement.

Right now Gentoo is one of the few distros that supports a non-systemd installation, mainly because the idea that as little as possible should ever be forced on the user is one of their core principles. Gentoo has very few mandated default anythings and they encourage users to file a bug if they discover an unnecessary one. I am interested in systemd and I acknowledge it probably isn't taking off so well for no reason, but this is why I'm not in any hurry to adopt it.

BTW OpenRC does have a form of state tracking. It simply uses start-stop-daemon for this, so that each initscript doesn't need to worry about it.

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It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Re:Whats wrong with init? by Billly+Gates · 2014-02-14 07:15 · Score: 2

What is wrong is it is not event driven.
It is nice for example is you can set your laptop up for different networks and when conditions change such as it sleeps and wakes up on a different network it can respond differently. You do not have to write a complex script for every possible combination you can think of.
Just put in the parameters and tell it what to do with events.
It can be used too after booting up for servers so if a hacking attempt is detected it can dynamically change its firewall settings as an example and send an email to you. You could try to do this with conventional scripts but it would be a lot more difficult
I am not experienced enough to qualify whether systemD is a good implementation as upstart also is event driven and somewhat sysV init compatible. But this is why Sun and Apple are phasing out init with event driven systems like this.

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Re:Whats wrong with init? by nabsltd · 2014-02-14 07:38 · Score: 4, Informative

In the end, yes, it's another config language you'll have to learn, but it's worth it.
Why is it worth it?
I've heard lots of "systemd is better" claims, but not one real-world example of how it took 27 hours to debug a startup issue when using SysV, but only 13 seconds using systemd. And, I really don't care about boot times, because my physical servers take 10 times as long running through BIOS checks as they do going from grub load to system ready. Even VMs don't matter much, as they don't get rebooted very often, so saving 5 seconds on a 30-second boot time isn't really a big deal.
On the other hand, I've heard lots of stories from people who have to install a custom service (i.e., not from a "apt-get" or "yum install") on a systemd system and complain about how it took hours to get the dependencies right.
Re:Whats wrong with init? by inhuman_4 · 2014-02-14 08:19 · Score: 2

The issue with systemd: it reeks of a solution looking for a problem.
The issue I belive is that the Linux kernel has been expanding its capabilities and the init system has not kept pace. Part of that reason is that to take advantage of Linux specific issues means breaking compatibility with other *nix systems.
Take cgroups for example. It is a Linux specific feature, and a great one at that. It can limit CPU, memory, and I/O processes not just just for one process, but for all of the processes that fork off of it. Along the way it solves the "escape by double forking" issue. For systems doing virtualization or running multiple servers it is exactly the kind of thing an admin would want for his services.
Or how about service dependancies? The sysem of A depends on B,F,K works great for all of our package managing systems, and has been for years. The is the reason upstart was adopted, the runlevel system is a very inelegant solution.
I'm not saying systemd is perfect. I really like status messages, but using a binary log file I think is a mistake. But it does provide new features that a lot of developers and admins will be able to take advantage of.
Re:Whats wrong with init? by HiThere · 2014-02-14 12:55 · Score: 2

Thank you for finally providing an answer that made sense.
Outside it that, I fully understand that attitude of people who don't like change for the sake of change...I'm one of them. Having to learn a new configure language is a pain when I'd rather be doing something else. But if there's a valid reason, that makes things more acceptable.

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like conceeding that air is necessary by Virtucon · 2014-02-14 04:58 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"

Re:like conceeding that air is necessary by raxx7 · 2014-02-14 05:14 · Score: 4, Insightful

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 by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-14 05:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

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 by skids · 2014-02-14 05:05 · Score: 2

It's actually a drain on embedded systems to do so much through shell scripting, having all those processes running scripts in an interpreted language. Systemd supposedly will allow a leaner build.

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Re:Embedded uses something different anyway by fishybell · 2014-02-14 05:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

At a point when even the cheapest SoC has more processing power, memory, and storage space than your current desktop the cost of learning and using a custom system like Busybox will outweigh the benefit for many. For devices that need instant-on capabilities I don't think it's realistic to expect anything other than a custom init, but for the rest I expect programmers to programmers; that is, lazy.

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Re:Embedded uses something different anyway by dalias · 2014-02-14 05:24 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Embedded uses something different anyway by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-14 05:34 · Score: 5, Informative

I don't think very much embedded stuff will ever use systemd..
I am using Angstrom, which uses systemd, for embedded stuff. Haven't had any problems with systemd, but haven't tried to do anything complex either. It gets stuff started at startup time, that's all I have needed.
Re:Embedded uses something different anyway by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-14 06:12 · Score: 2, Interesting

Shell scripts are horribly inefficient and systemd is already being used in some embedded systems (BMW for instance).
Re:Embedded uses something different anyway by RR · 2014-02-14 08:50 · Score: 3, Interesting

It's actually a drain on embedded systems to do so much through shell scripting, having all those processes running scripts in an interpreted language.
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.
Memory isn't the only resource. (And if you're using Linux, you're already using a ton of memory.) Systemd brings standardized, concurrent, event-driven startup, so it takes less time to start up, both CPU time and wall clock time. For example, systemd's declarative unit files have much less boilerplate and take less effort to parse than SysV-style init scripts.
At this point, systemd has also been concentrating on correctness and functionality. They aren't even optimizing for speed and memory consumption, yet. It would be interesting if Busybox added a systemd-style init.

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Re:Embedded uses something different anyway by RR · 2014-02-14 21:42 · Score: 2

Startup speed is simply not an issue anymore. Your typical server is supposed to be up most of the time, your typical desktop or mobile device is sleeping or suspended when it's not running, and your embedded device only has very few services that it needs to start, to the point where even SysV init is overkill and you're better off with rc.conf or something similar.
That's incorrect.
The big excitement in servers is Elastic Compute. There, you do want servers that can boot up and shut down as quickly as possible, to handle varying demands. It seems that even Linux is considered to take too long, so some Linux kernel maintainers are making their own cloud OS that boots up even faster.
Desktops and mobiles do reboot sometimes. Fast booting was a major selling point for Unix during the age of The UNIX-HATERS Handbook. A bigger benefit for modern PCs is how systemd uses sockets and cgroups to control program state. And I thought the thread was about embedded.
There is more than one type of embedded device. In particular, I am annoyed at how home routers have progressed from, for example, the Netgear WGT624 which took about 15 seconds to boot, to now the Netgear R6300 which takes over a minute to respond to PING, and I'm not sure how much longer until it's fully functional. Sure, once it's configured and running, it's nice, but a typical setup could take several reboots and cause a lot of wasted time.
The R6300 has 128MB of flash and at least 128MB of RAM. That's a lot. Surely it can hold systemd.

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Re:I agree by ZarathustraDK · 2014-02-14 05:06 · Score: 4, Interesting

Your comment made me switch back to Ubuntu. Seems like all the tinfoil-whiners are gone from there now.

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systemd violates the UNIX philosophy by bzipitidoo · 2014-02-14 05:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Re:systemd violates the UNIX philosophy by joejor · 2014-02-14 05:26 · Score: 4, Informative

Here's a pretty good treatise on the shortcomings of systemd: http://ewontfix.com/14/
Re:systemd violates the UNIX philosophy by broken_chaos · 2014-02-14 05:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

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: by wonkey_monkey · 2014-02-14 05:16 · Score: 2, Insightful

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

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Re:Why I don't like systemd: by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-14 05:23 · Score: 4, Informative

put this line in your .bashrc file
alias service='systemctl'

why not the new thing? by dAzED1 · 2014-02-14 05:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:why not the new thing? by broken_chaos · 2014-02-14 05:59 · Score: 4, Informative

If a daemon has problems and needs to restart itself how does it do that?
...Monit? runit? Two completely different approaches to service monitoring, one not even in an init system. And there are more (s6, daemontools, etc.).

hundreds or thousands of daemons
...What the heck are you running that puts thousands of daemons on a single server? If you're doing something this large, you might want to consider virtualization. Thousands of daemons is a gigantic attack surface to have on a single system, and a mess if something were to go wrong with one of them that takes down everything.
Re:why not the new thing? by tokiko · 2014-02-14 12:53 · Score: 2

Correction: The original post about systemd was not complaining about using grep and awk on the scripts. The complaint was that the scripts where calling these commands way too often during the normal boot up procedure.

On my system the scripts in /etc/init.d call grep at least 77 times. awk is called 92 times, cut 23 and sed 74. Every time those commands (and others) are called, a process is spawned, the libraries searched, some start-up stuff like i18n and so on set up and more.

Re: by binarylarry · 2014-02-14 05:48 · Score: 5, Funny

Well fuck it, lets rewrite the Linux kernel in bash!

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Re:I agree by caseih · 2014-02-14 06:07 · Score: 2

Fedora made the transition some time ago, and from a user's point of view it was completely transparent.

RHEL7 beta has transitioned to systemd, and again it's pretty transparent. The old service command is still there and thunks through to systemd. The only time you really notice the difference is if you want to install a custom daemon. You can either use an init script, or you can create a simple systemd service file. There are a few systemctl commands to learn. But really, it's as close to a painless transition as you can get.

Nuts, upstart syntax is so easy by exabrial · 2014-02-14 06:17 · Score: 4, Insightful

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:Sigh. by caseih · 2014-02-14 06:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

Yes if you think systemd is bad, either rip it out on your machine or roll your own distro. Or move to FreeBSD. It's available now, and it runs great. So no need to whine. Just move to an operating system that fits your personal parameters. More likely you'll stick with your current distro and whine and moan about something that you don't well understand.

On the desktop side of things, I've been watching Linux struggle for years to do simple things like deal with removable media and USB devices. For a while there was hal, then udev, and now systemd. And finally things are actually working, and working rather well. Mostly thanks to udev, but systemd now builds on that. I know many people don't mind manually mounting devices and loading modules to make usb devices work (I don't mind, really). But it's nice to have things automatically work.

And really systemd on the service isn't that bad an idea either. Fine-grained logging is very useful and conventional syslog is still available and will always be there. Process supervision is something that's been needed for a long while now.

Re: by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-14 07:02 · Score: 3, Funny

"You mean you don't love me anymore?" sobbed PHP.

SystemVd - beware! by Freshly+Exhumed · 2014-02-14 07:21 · Score: 2

I got SystemVd on vacation in Thailand and now I'll never be able to spawn child processes again.

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Re: by nicolastheadept · 2014-02-14 07:46 · Score: 4, Funny

The truth is I never loved you

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systemd: broken by design by trek00 · 2014-02-14 08:49 · Score: 3, Interesting

a really interesting reading: http://ewontfix.com/14/

Re:Stupidity is contagious by fgodfrey · 2014-02-14 08:55 · Score: 4, Interesting

The distros are going with it presumably because they think they need it to turn Linux into a desktop or notebook OS. However, they seem to be ignoring the issues it presents for servers. Let's take my *THREE HOUR* debugging session on systemd yesterday. I had a netboot system up and running. Client boots from Server and mounts root filesystem from Server. I changed from Server A to Server B. Due to an NFSv4 vs. NFSv3 issue, Client could no longer mount the root filesystem read/write. Simple, right? It would've been with SysV init because the errors during the mount would've been spewed to the console and I would've seen them. What *actually* happened is that a bunch of services failed to start. Instead of spewing the error message, systemd "helpfully" told me to run "systemctl status" on the service to see the error message. Except that I never got to a login prompt due to the errors. And I couldn't mount the filesystem read/write so it lost the logs.

Two+ hours later, I managed to disable enough stuff to get to a login prompt where I was finally able to figure out what was going on (never did get systemctl to show me the logs, probably because they couldn't be written to disk and it doesn't seem to hold them in RAM).

Please explain to me what the advantage of systemd is again? Because I'm *REALLY* not seeing it. It took something that was trivial to figure out and made it astronomically difficult. I no longer have any idea what order my services start in or whether that order is repeatable. Yes, SysV init scripts were really long. But once you learned them, you realized that you only had to modify 5 or 6 lines of them to get a new service going. I have yet to figure out how to even create a service with systemd or how I figure out what I'm depending on.

In short, for a server, I have yet to see a single advantage of systemd over SysV init. Maybe I'm missing something and someone will enlighten me, but I'm extremely skeptical.

Am I just resistant to learning new things? Maybe, but learning stuff takes time and my time is money for my employer. So if I'm not getting a return on my investment of time (in new capabilities or reduced debugging time or *something*), why would I invest the time to become an expert on systemd?

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Re: by Dishevel · 2014-02-14 09:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

The real truth is you are completely unlovable.

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Re:Stupidity is contagious by Omicron32 · 2014-02-14 12:00 · Score: 2

> I have yet to figure out how to even create a service with systemd or how I figure out what I'm depending on.

man systemd.profile

> Let's take my *THREE HOUR* debugging session on systemd yesterday. [...] It would've been [simple] with SysV init because the errors during the mount would've been spewed to the console and I would've seen them.

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/So...

30 seconds of Googling.

Not really sure what the problem is here other than your ignorance.

Re:Sigh. by shutdown+-p+now · 2014-02-14 19:12 · Score: 2

The big problem with systemd is that it is trying very hard to make itself a non-replaceable component. Gnome effectively depends on it now, for example, and with udev being merged into it you basically can't avoid systemd without forking udev (which some Gentoo guys are trying to do). It also exposes public DBus APIs and a wrapper lib that's intended to be used by daemons to e.g. report lifecycle events, which obviously makes them systemd-specific. And the developer of systemd is actively campaigning for people to write Linux-specific and systemd-specific code.

So long term, we're looking at a landscape where any distro not on systemd is marginalized (because they are incompatible with at least one of the two major DEs and a bunch of other software, have to author their own startup scripts from scratch etc). FreeBSD would be marginalized even further if Poettering's idea of heavily relying on Linux-specific features is widely adopted. So overall choice would be restricted.

This isn't to say that the systemd doesn't solve real problems. The question is whether it solves them in the right way, and whether the price you have to pay for it is worth the benefits. There are other systems out there that try to solve the same problems by different means, sacrificing some things but avoiding creeping dependencies throughout the software ecosystem and overall complexity. OpenRC, for example.

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