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Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users'
M-Saunders writes: Systemd is ambitious and controversial, taking over a large part of the GNU/Linux base system. But where did it come from? Even Red Hat wasn't keen on it at the start, but since then it has worked its way into almost every major distro. Linux Voice talks to Lennart Poettering, the lead developer of Systemd, about its origins, its future, its relationship with Upstart, and handling the pressures of online flamewars.
I don't care bout the unix way, I don't care about if it's monolithic or not, I don't even care about how annoyed I am by the mere mention of his name.
I care about the fact that they seem to want to force their way into everything and everyone's business and ridicule anyone who tries to maintain a choice between systemd and other systems. (i.e Gentoo)
I'm a user and a hobby developer. No, I don't maintain 2000 servers, I don't need 2 second boot time, I don't need to hotswap drives. But I do need choices. I need to be able to decide what I want to use so I can get on with my fucking day and do what I want.
"But systemd is the best, why don't you want to use it?"
But Emacs!
But firefox!
But chrome!
But but but but!
The very first thing out of his mouth is a straw man.
This is not how to get people to change their minds.
You know how you hear that after a customer service call? Well Poettering's statement has the same meaning.
Well, do you actually take on board the concerns of system administrators and enterprise users?
What a lot of people are concerned about is that this entirely new and largely untested (in the 'wild', as it were) and very very large, complex piece of software which runs at a very very privileged level in the operating system is going to become the main source of security vulnerabilities in Linux.
Can we have a cut-down, simplified version of systemd for servers and doesn't try to replace several layers of server side system functionality such as logging?
Its clear that you listen to desktop users. How about listening to the system administrators?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I am personally neutral on SystemD... but as someone in IT, it is quite worrisome that there is new, untested code sitting as the core userland... code that can make network connections, and has not ever seen any reviews or audits.
SystemD could be the best piece of coding on this planet... but without documentation or assurance that this is something trustworthy, a major security hole can cause major trouble. Network connections mean remote root holes. Even without that, there is the problem of local privilege escalation, which I worry hasn't been thought of, much less engineered to deal with. If there is a major show-stopper in SystemD that allows remote root, this can kill Linux as a whole in the enterprise.
This code was also forced on us, as in "you need to have SystemD on your job, or else you don't have a job". No transition time, no time to change applications to meet this, just "here you go. Deal with it. Better get used to binary logs, because it is that or nothing."
So, as someone who uses Linux in the enterprise, SystemD is something that is resulting in a lot resentment, due to time spent with making build documents, workarounds for existing applications, procedures to make custom code work... all for relatively little benefit other than "hey, this is new and shiny, and you have to deal with it."
I can understand the perspective that a single repository for more of the userspace resembles the *development* of traditional Unix systems, the argument made is usually not about where it is developed, but reducing the principle of having small simple utilities with straightforward interactions with other componets. For example, Most traditional Unix systems have terrible implementations of a shell interpreter and things like fileutils. It is an awkward, but not too terrible a situation since you can replace that stuff with GNU equivalents trivially without horribly breaking the OS. An administrator that understands enough to write scripts can discern the nature of interaction even if that administrator isn't a full-on software developer. systemd design trends in many ways toward requiring someone needing to dig in to have more development competency than previous designs. As a developer, I understand the attraction of some of the architecture choices, but I think they lose perspective of what it's like to be an administrator on the ground. Someone who doesn't live and breath your code has a harder time wrapping their heads around how it should be working when something requires customization, replacement, or debug.
In general, systemd is all-or-nothnig about a lot of things. They figure out a way to achieve what could be considered a sensible goal, but then go about it in highly disruptive ways. The sense is they throw up their hands and say 'well, this is the only way to do it, and it's worth it' rather than rethinking how the end could be achieved in a less disruptive way.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's a lot better than openrc, which is needlessly slow due to being written in bash and fails at running tasks that don't depend on each other in parallel. I've converted both my desktop and laptop and now more concerned with keeping openrc away from Gentoo.
OpenRC is written in C for the most part. Each init script is shell based though and works fine with pretty much any shell.
You can use bash if you want to, but I prefer to run dash.
As to the parallel start up - well, some users do have an issue depending on what services they have installed and configured.
I personally have no problem with it and use it all the time.
As to the speed? Well, it gets me to the desktop in the same number of seconds as systemd.
users: Systemd is broken, undocumented and a single point of failure
Pottering: no ones forcing you to use it, use something else.
users: KDE and Gnome wont work without it and you never fixed pulseaudio, which is now default in almost every distro.
Pottering: no ones forcing you to use it, use something else
users: Why is there binary logging? I cant grep anything and dont know why the system crashed. the way user switching works is a huge security hole
pottering:no ones forcing you to use it, use something else
DEBIAN USERS:: Lets seriously reconsider the use of SystemD. its very controversial, it flies against the unix ethos, and there are some valid points raised about it security
open source community: we've forked it and made it slightly more useful.
Pottering: HOLD ON WE DO LISTEN TO USERS!!
Good people go to bed earlier.
"Their impotent wails of despair give us sustenance."
According to wikipedia: "The Unix philosophy emphasizes building short, simple, clear, modular, and extensible code that can be easily maintained and repurposed by developers other than its creators. The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design.".
Okay, so how exactly does systemd violate this ?
There's more to it than that, and systemd also violates some of those principles anyway; many here have complained about the lack of code quality. But the Unix philosophy also includes a love for flat, human-readable files, and systemd's syslog shits on that. You have to run yet another syslog to even get text logging, and it's a second-class citizen — it gets the log messages after the binary logging system gets them.
Also, systemd is a thing without a reason to exist. It doesn't actually provide anything we didn't have before. It exists purely due to Lennart's NIH syndrome, and for no other reason. As others have pointed out, openrc does the things which systemd's init functionality does. That means that its original basic reason for existence is nonsensical. As many including myself have pointed out, most of it can be handled by very small shell scripts. Some rail against this, but shell scripting is also part of the Unix philosophy. That's part of the core idea of the operating system! There's nothing wrong with using scripting to make things happen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I WISH I didn't notice it in userspace.
Some people run servers that MUST be up and running. They have no time for bullshit. They have no time to pick through a bazillion little config files when it's not up and running. They need the machine to just do what they tell it to and do it now. Systemd just thumbs it's nose at that. It does only a limited number of things and only in the way that it wants to do them. If that's not what you need done, too bad.
The hate is amplified by the concerted effort to cram systemd down their throats. That's a perfectly understandable reaction IMHO.
For example, I built a test machine with btrfs and set it up to mount in degraded mode such that even if a disk fails, it should still boot up. In production, it would email me that a disk failed and I could decide between replace the disk immediately or rebalance to make sure everything is still redundant.
Systemd absolutely refuses to do it. It won't even attempt the mount command because it has decided that a drive isn't there and even though it is completely redundant systemd calls it a show stopper. Nobody can seem to tell me how to make systemd issue the mount command anyway (the systemd maioling lists have discussed that very problem wrt RAID and can't seem to solve the problem), nor can anyone give me a solution to make systemd ignore fstab entirely and run a script I wrote instead (a script that only needs one command, 'mount -a'). Apparently, you can't actually do that.
Consider, RAID and similar are high availability features. Their whole reason to be is making sure the system is available even if a drive fails. Systemd single-handedly defeats that whole purpose by refusing to even try to mount the root filesystem. That's really a poor showing, but the insight it gives me into the project is even worse. It tells me that in spite of the importance of redundancy (some enterprises spend gadzillions on it) and the fact that it has worked well under SysVinit for over a decade, not one person on the systemd team even considered it. Not one. Now that it has been brought to their attention, they can't even come up with a workaround for it (see what I said above about do what I say and do it now). All I need is an unconditional 'mount -a' and apparently it can't be done. In spite of that, the various systemd boosters refuse to admit the problem even exists. I have even had a few claim it's a feature meant to protect my data.
So there it is. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a simple boolean: "Did my system boot" and the objective answer is no. There is the followup, "how then, can I make systemd boot it" and the answer is [crickets].
Fortunately, it was just a VM I stood up for testing and not an actual server that I needed up. As a quick test, I replaced systemd with sysVinit using apt and suddenly, it just worked.
And that is why everyone is so keen on making sure nothing else becomes dependent on systemd.