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Debate Over Systemd Exposes the Two Factions Tugging At Modern-day Linux

Posted by Soulskill on from the fight-to-the-death dept.

walterbyrd (182728) sends this article about systemd from Paul Venezia, who writes: In discussions around the Web in the past few months, I've seen an overwhelming level of support of systemd from Linux users who run Linux on their laptops and maybe a VPS or home server. I've also seen a large backlash against systemd from Linux system administrators who are responsible for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of Linux servers, physical and virtual. ... The release of RHEL 7 has brought the reality of systemd to a significant number of admins whose mantra is stability over all else and who perhaps had not waded into the choppier waters of Fedora or Debian unstable to work with systemd before it arrived in RHEL.

2 of 863 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not true. There's a different division by Cyberax · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    People that are older, smarter, and wiser than YOU realize that the basic concept of systemd is just fucked.

    Yeah, sure. Here's your Social Security check grampa, go and watch Fox news.

    While we (the new and stupid generation) actually start designing software that is built on a _reliable_ base instead of cobbled up shitmobile that are classic initscripts. Seriously, when shit scripts like this: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit... are shipped in a major Linux distribution - you can't hope to build something that works on a large scale with them.

  2. Re:How about we hackers? by ToasterMonkey · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    When I first saw SMF break I had absolutely no clue why I couldnt ssh into the machine nor where to start looking. It was when I discovered that sshd startup was dependent on utmp being available which depended on filesystem mounting being successful that I knew for sure that systemd style init was nothing I wanted.

    So if SSH still has that dependency but not enforced, and it starts up before utmp is mounted, and you fix the filesystem problem and move on...
    As experienced admins, I don't think either of us know what state SSH is actually in at that point, and we shouldn't be guessing. Is it working, but not logging logins? Do you happen to troll all your daemon logs for random errors... provided this condition is even logged in a sensible manner?

    As inconvenient as it is (yes, I know), this feature is to prevent us entering unknown state as much as possible.
    If I can make an educated guess, the real problem in that scenario was likely /etc/fstab configuration vs. reality, an unknown state puss-wound.

    WAAAAAAY too often in Unix-land people gloss over things like this in favor of the simpler olden days when we just ignored these problems. If those services are designed to be up in a certain order, why take it any other way? Should remote login be available with fewer dependencies - YES! What does that have to do with Init enforcing the ones it does have - NOTHING.

    Different subject, but related to what I just said... I saw someone above say they don't have to reboot because they can "restart a daemon". /facepalm
    Use "lsof" next time you patch guys, it's just not that simple, and if you have to take services offline anyway, you may as well reboot just so you know things like fstab are actually correct...