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SystemD Gains New Networking Features
jones_supa writes A lot of development work is happening on systemd with just the recent couple of weeks seeing over 200 commits. With the most recent work that has landed, the networkd component has been improved with new features. Among the additions are IP forwarding and masquerading support (patch). This is the minimal support needed and these settings get turned on by default for container network interfaces. Also added was minimal firewall manipulation helpers for systemd's networkd. The firewall manipulation helpers (patch) are used for establishing NAT rules. This support in systemd is provided by libiptc, the library used for communicating with the Linux kernel's Netfilter and changing iptables firewall rulesets. Those wishing to follow systemd development on a daily basis and see what is actually happening under the hood, can keep tabs via the systemd Git viewer.
Christ almighty, this beast is a fucking monster. What's next, a shell and a userland?
Glad I'm heading to FreeBSD. Linux is going down the tubes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What the hell is happening to the Linux ecosystem?
I've been a user of it for a couple of decades now. Although it wasn't perfect, for years it provided a better environment for me than Windows or even OS X could provide.
But that's really started to change maybe within the past 5 years. The first major debacle I can think of is GNOME 3. They went out of their way to ignore everything good about GNOME 2, and instead forced all sorts of stupid ideas upon us.
Firefox is the next debacle I can think of. It's a lot like GNOME 3 in many ways. There was a good, reliable, usable browser in Firefox 3.5. Then it all went to hell in Firefox 4 and beyond.
Now we have systemd, which is obviously dumb in pretty much all respects. It just doesn't fit within the Linux ecosystem at all. That's probably why it's so disruptive.
What makes systemd worse, though, is the impact it has had on pretty much all of the major Linux distros. Pretty much all of the most usable and useful ones (sorry, Slackware, this excludes you) have switched to it, with horrible results.
The stability of my Debian testing system has gone down the shitter since they switched to systemd some time ago. I've had more problems properly booting my system in the past six months than I had in the 15 years prior to systemd getting installed.
I'm torn at this point. I'm probably going to buy a Mac and move to OS X for my personal system, while moving all of my servers over to FreeBSD as soon as I can. I'm pretty sure that I'm done with Linux at this point. I just don't think the ecosystem can be salvaged. So much good software has been ruined.
Systemd is truly the best thing that has ever happened to the BSD community.
Systemd alone is making Linux totally unsuitable for serious use. So what are people doing when a formerly-stable distro like Debian adopts systemd and becomes a disaster? They're moving to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD and PC-BSD.
Just today we find out that DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD. There's clearly a very bright future ahead for the BSDs.
And it's clear now that Linux is on its way out. While Linux and Linux systems will still be around for some time, of course, everyone important who made Linux great in the past is fleeing from it. We're moving to BSD, because unlike the Linux community, the BSD community does things right. Something like systemd would never be taken seriously by them.
I asked a few months back now, about the possibility of BSD on Digital Ocean due to all of the SystemD shenanigans of late. Got an email notification today that FreeBSD droplets are now available on Digital Ocean. It will be interesting to see if other VPS/Linux providers follow suit.
CB.
but even Microsoft managed to avoid building a console, web server, and QR code server into its init system.
Actually, when it comes to consoles... they kinda did.
Consoles in Windows run as part of the Client/Server Runtime Subsystem, which isn't exactly equivalent to init but kind of is. Killing CSRSS causes a BSOD as it's considered that critical to Windows. (Sort of, apparently it's not a "real" BSOD. Do not ask me what that means, I don't know.)
This was the reason that the Windows console didn't support themes (like the XP theme or the Aero theme) until Windows 7 - it was too tightly coupled to the core OS and Microsoft didn't want to introduce security risks via themes.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
It annoys me that someone like Poettering, who only had PulseAudio come into use because of the ability distributions had to easily change core operating system components (and wouldn't have had the existing audio-subsystem been entrenched), would then proceed to develop something specifically intended to lock down its own existence and prevent its replacement by something else. It's hypocritical.
While I totally understand why he did it -- nobody wants to put a great amount of time into something only to have it superseded -- it flies in the face of open source in general, where you contribute to an evolving 'thing', and that while your specific contribution may not exist in the future, you can be happy that you took part in the evolution of the whole, and not feel the need to stamp your face on it for perpetuity.
It also sets a dangerous precedent. What's going to be locked down next, in the name of stability, or speed, or whatever else (when it's really about someone trying to 'make their mark'?) Do we lock down the file system? Only one file system for Linux, full stop? Do we lock down the network transports? The window manager? The terminal? The command-line applications?
Then what? Do we then create a global committee, made up of people who maintain the existing components (of course), to make decisions about those components and whatever's left into the future?
I mean, yes, I agree in that case something else will surely (and quickly) rise in Linux's place (I mean, who wants to put in the time to help projects who only exist to serve their creator's vanity) but it seems a shame that Linux should end this way.
"Here, in Lennart's own words"
No, *this* are Lennart's own words:
let's summarize what we are trying to do:
* We want an efficient way that allows vendors to package their software
* We want to allow end users and administrators to install these packages on their systems, regardless which distribution they have installed on it.
* We want a unified solution that ultimately can cover updates for full systems, OS containers, end user apps, programming ABIs, and more.
* We want our images to be trustable (i.e. signed). In fact we want a fully trustable OS
So my reading is: we want Linux ecosystem to disappear and be substituted by Microsoft's business model where there's just one OS (Red Hat) and a set of corporate software vendors.
Systemd's occasional (read: frequent in one of my pcs) failure to shutdown is how I found out that the devs had decided that sysreq was too dangerous for the users to have and had to be disabled.
So I was stuck with a system waiting forever for something to shutdown, and without being able to use sysreq to kill all the processes and unmount file systems safely. Of course, the only way out was a hardware reset, with the subsequent log corruption that let me with no hints on why systemd would not allow my pc to shutdown. Well, at least it got me moving to evaluate the still rational linux distributions out there, as well as the *BSDs, something I had been procrastinating for a few months.