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Fork of Systemd Leads To Lightweight Uselessd
An anonymous reader writes A boycott of systemd and other backlash around systemd's feature-creep has led to the creation of Uselessd, a new init daemon. Uselessd is a fork of systemd 208 that strips away functionality considered irrelevant to an init system like the systemd journal and udev. Uselessd also adds in functionality not accepted in upstream systemd like support for alternative C libraries (namely uClibc and musl) and it's even being ported to BSD.
Ordinarily I would agree, but systemd's "MCP-like" behaviour (TRON reference, I honestly believe that's a valid simile) means that uselessd has a chance of being a replacement for systemd packages of existing distributions. If I can put this in place of systemd on centos7 and have it boot in an unprivileged container (currnetly impossible with stock) then that's a win in my book.
You can't just switch systemd for openrc in an existing distribution without some major resistance. Believe me, I wish it could or I would just install openrc or upstart. That's the problem - systemd is claiming distributions and the list of alternatives is unnervingly small.
Not just that, but running a non-systemd system even if you use a distro that uses openrc by default is becoming more of a pain as more and more packages hook into it. As a Gentoo user who is trying to hold off for just a little while longer I've found myself doing a lot of package shuffling and using the package blacklist for the first time in the almost decade I've been a gentoo user.
I thought it would be serious until I visited uselessd' site (http://uselessd.darknedgy.net) and saw such gem: "This has meant eradicating plenty of GNUisms" and GNUisms being a link to... USA's Communist Party (no, seriously: http://www.cpusa.org/).
Yes. No. Wait - yes. No... no. Uh....
The systemd has modular design.
But monolithic architecture.
Literally everything inside systemd is intertwined using the D-Bus.
So yes, a crash of one of the systemd daemons might cause deadlock/hang or even crash of the rest of the systemd, and consequently affect the processes running under it.
The systemd's design is pretty bad. This is not an exaggeration, when people call it Windows-like: MSWindows OS has very very similar atructure as the systemd. Windows "Event Log" is really cherry topping.
On-topic: uselessd doesn't fix this problem. It lessens it, but doesn't fix it.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I agree and am happy to see this fork. As unpopular as it may make me, I actually like the initd functionality of systemd. I'm fine with using and writing the old init scripts, but systemd unit files are simple, concise, and powerful enough for my needs.
On the other hand, I find the kitchen-sink feature creep of systemd absolutely repulsive. Cramming all of that functionality into PID 1 as a unwieldy monolith seems like such a deeply flawed exercise. Uselessd seems like a perfect replacement for systemd: all of the benefits and none/less of the cruft.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
systemd is designed to use specific features of the linux kernel. That's why kernel developers as a group aren't up and arms about it. Sure you might get some occasional people like Ted Tso upset, but in general systemd exposes kernel features that a lot of people have worked hard on. Things like cgroups are using copiously in systemd.
Which is why I don't see a systemd fork as a viable alternative. The whole idea is broken, as it breaks with the Unix toolbox approach, where tools work independently, and not as a clusterfuck of apps that engage in social networking under the dictatorship of an object-oriented leviathan.
I have turned down Red Hat EL 7 for my business systems, and install RHEL 6 with vaious 3rd party repos to get new packages, precisely because of systemd.
A leaner fork of systemd just won't do it.
Give me an init that only does init and does it well with a KISS philosophy. And give me hal back - systemd-udev cannot do what it does, which makes RHEL 7 unusable. I don't want a 90% system, when the 10% is used by my business to earn money.
That's the whole point of all of this mess: {,k}dbus
Neither an init system nor vertical integration are the goal. The one consistent thing in all of the "systemd mess" is to leave the actual implementation officially a moving target where the trditional .so based library APIs are either hidden and undocumented or they are left out entirely. This forces you to use an IPC mechanism (dbus/kdbus) instead of simply linking to the functions you need and calling them directly. Forcing data to be serialized/unserialized so it can be sent over IPC is not nearly as efficient as calling a dynamically loaded local function. The systemd people love fast thing ("boot time!", etc), so why would they require this slow IPC everywhere?
*** if you never need to link to a library to use it, you can "link" to and distribute GPL code without being bound by the GPL. Poettering's cabal and systemd is an attempt to enable a new form of "tivoization" ***
If you are technically only "using" a library (no linking, no modifications to the library), you have not "infected" your proprietary code with the GPL. It's slower, but computers got fast enough that it doesn't really matter.
The nasty part is that by forcing arbitrary incompatable interface with systemd, to run stuff like GNOME you have to provide the key dbus features even if you don't use systemd. The end-run around the GPL still works with uselessd or any other "systemd replacement".
Unfortunatley, Lennart's cabal has everybody discussing technical features so this obvious goal isn't even addressed.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
you just can't work out how much is complete FUD and whats a genuine gripe
Once upon a time I used to carefully go over all aspects of my system, and compile custom kernels, fine-tune startup, etc. I haven't bothered in the last decade or so when things work out of the box and I want to concentrate on what I am using the computer for instead of polishing the backend. That said, I've been following some of the systemd news, and responses to it seem to be a real mess and a huge amount of complaints that end up just being strawmen (probably not intentionally). There are legit idealogical complaints I can appreciate, but the vast majority of specific, detailed complaints I come across I later find out are just false. Too many complaints saying "It can't use X" or "It forces you to use Y", when it turns out there is a simple option to change to use X or not use Y... or in many cases where it flat out doesn't do Y or already uses X by default. It makes it rather difficult to take complaints seriously, talking about the "*nix way," when I thought RTFM used to be part of the *nix way.
This is just more anti-systemd FUD very light on actual facts.
First you assert that it's somehow a bad thing that systemd uses a standard, established IPC mechanism (D-Bus). Would it have been better if it had invented its own?
Then you claim that a crash of one systemd daemon "might" cause deadlocks/hangs/crashes, but you don't give any example. What daemons are intertwined in such a way that a failure of one would bring down the system? As far as I know, you can kill any systemd daemon (other than PID 1, obviously), and systemd will notice and restart it. Daemons like systemd-journald even use systemd's watchdog mechanism to ensure that they get restarted in case of a hang. In other words, systemd provides a much stronger basis for a reliable system than SysV init.
Fun fact: I just did a "kill -9 -1" to kill every process in a NixOS VM except PID 1. Systemd restarted every system service perfectly. Try that on SysV init.