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Choose Your Side On the Linux Divide
snydeq writes The battle over systemd exposes a fundamental gap between the old Unix guard and a new guard of Linux developers and admins, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. "Last week I posted about the schism brewing over systemd and the curiously fast adoption of this massive change to many Linux distributions. If there's one thing that systemd does extremely well, it is to spark heated discussions that devolve into wild, teeth-gnashing rants from both sides. Clearly, systemd is a polarizing subject. If nothing else, that very fact should give one pause. Fundamental changes in the structure of most Linux distributions should not be met with such fervent opposition. It indicates that no matter how reasonable a change may seem, if enough established and learned folks disagree with the change, then perhaps it bears further inspection before going to production. Clearly, that hasn't happened with systemd."
the general concept behind systemd makes sense, its mainly some additional features on top of the current model, such as the ability to have processes started on certain system events. The fact is, if you want your bootup process to be controlled by bash scripts, all you need to do is configure systemd to start your bash script and youve got a more traditional init system. So, systemd does not take away any functionality, only adds it. Systemd supports the system v init process features so you still have all the old model functionality available to you. So, it does not make much sense that people complain about this when they can easily configure things however they want, including having a BSD style init, by having systemd hand off control to your own scripts, including to work the way things always have. People act like systemd has taken away something when it has not, i think many people just hears some soundbite about systemd introducing a new model and assume that they can no longer use things the way they do currently, which is not the case. it seems like people who don't like systemd don't want people to have the additional functionality that it provides, because it does not take away anything. Its open source software, and its something that you can control and configure to your hearts content. Its much ado about nothing. systemd, while being configurable, also will make things easier to use for many users. I think the ado about systemd is more about Linux people who think that Linux should be hard to use except for a small elite and do not want the OS to be useful to less technically adept users. This is even though making it more useable for less adept users does not in any way harm or take away flexibility from experts, who can still configure everything if they want they want to.
What system V and systemd do is initialise the OS, let me kinda explain, you turn on your pc, it loads the bootloader which in turn loads the init system, the init's systems job is to hand off certain jobs to certain programs, getty so you have cli, X so you have a nice GUI, and starts or stops services. This is a very simplistic explanation. Now it's my belief that Init should be made with separate components, for instance system V will read the scripts from /etc/rc.d and depending on those scripts depends what's loaded at boot time. Now the problem with systemd is (from what I believe) is that it's a one-stop for all, encompassing all the scripts needed, and gaining bloat (mostly not needed) at the same time. It's starting to be the "registry" of the linux world. and NO-ONE with a hint of intelligence wanted the Windows registry, let alone a clone of one.
http://chimpbox.us
Was that so hard?
Hey, guess what? I did that, and it didn't work.
Hint: you missed at least one more place where you have to change the port number.
One great thing about Unixen is how they share common interfaces. The more you change that, the less interchangeable the various Unixen become.
The init system is a very poor example of Unix common interfaces. As beelsebob and oursland point out, different Unix systems use different init systems. The Linux alternatives, upstart and systemd, were actually inspired by the clear advantages displayed by MacOS X's launchd.
And even in Linux, with SysVinit, there are different interfaces. When you want a script to run at boot, do you use update-rc.d, like Debian? Do you use rc-update like Gentoo's OpenRC? Or chkconfig like Red Hat? Or insserv like SuSE? And where do you find important details like the hostname and network configuration?
I don't find systemd to be a pleasing design, and I especially don't share their love of long command names with lots of consonants, but I think their work is very important.
Have a nice time.
RHEL 6.5 uses Upstart. It does not have Systemd.