Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System

lkcl writes The introduction of systemd has unilaterally created a polarization of the GNU/Linux community that is remarkably similar to the monopolistic power position wielded by Microsoft in the late 1990s. Choices were stark: use Windows (with SMB/CIFS Services), or use UNIX (with NFS and NIS). Only the introduction of fully-compatible reverse-engineered NT Domains services corrected the situation. Instructions on how to remove systemd include dire warnings that "all dependent packages will be removed", rendering a normal Debian Desktop system flat-out impossible to achieve. It was therefore necessary to demonstrate that it is actually possible to run a Debian Desktop GUI system (albeit an unusual one: fvwm) with libsystemd0 removed. The reason for doing so: it doesn't matter how good systemd is believed to be or in fact actually is: the reason for removing it is, apart from the alarm at how extensive systemd is becoming (including interfering with firewall rules), it's the way that it's been introduced in a blatantly cavalier fashion as a polarized all-or-nothing option, forcing people to consider abandoning the GNU/Linux of their choice and to seriously consider using FreeBSD or any other distro that properly respects the Software Freedom principle of the right to choose what software to run. We aren't all "good at coding", or paid to work on Software Libre: that means that those people who are need to be much more responsible, and to start — finally — to listen to what people are saying. Developing a thick skin is a good way to abdicate responsibility and, as a result, place people into untenable positions.

Comments

meanwhile...

[steak]

slackware users are saying "what's all this then?"

Re:meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

slackware users are saying "what's all this then?"

So are Gentoo users who chose OpenRC. Even if systemd was the best init system ever, and that's quite debatable, I still don't like the way it's being rammed down our throats. I for one reject Poettering.

I didn't like (and never used) Pulseaudio either. If I wanted to play sound over a network I'd share my media directory. Then I enjoy the ability to also share all of my media (videos, ebooks, etc) in a completely transparent application-agnostic manner. What I wouldn't do is run an unnecessary audio layer requiring application support - and that can do nothing else - in the form of a sound daemon I never wanted and didn't ask for. Software mixing you say? It's called dmix.

I moved away from Windows and towards open source years ago in order to have choice. I will have that choice whether or not most major distributions gargle the Poettering cock. If Gentoo ever caves in (unlikely but possible), I plan to move to OpenBSD to replace my Gentoo Hardened server and maybe FreeBSD to replace my workstation. The Unix Philosophy has withstood the test of time and I believe in it. I'm sure the kool-aid is quite tasty, but no thanks, I'll pass.

Re:meanwhile...

[93 Escort Wagon]

So are Gentoo users who chose OpenRC.

Assuming it ever finished compiling...

Re:meanwhile...

[jbolden]

The funny thing is the people working on OpenRC threw in the towel over a year ago. They can't keep up. OpenRC was a good idea, it truly was init.d version 3.0. But in practice it is non-viable as a replacement for all systemd is doing today as the developers on it admit. Gentoo will be able to hold out a long time because of the nature of the distribution but I suspect that within 2-3 years Gentoo will be overwhelmingly systemd.

Re:meanwhile...

[Truekaiser]

I used to hate pulseaudio too, until i was forced to use it to get the games i was buying off of steam to have sound.
Then I found out that if you disable or ignore the network sound feature it mainly boots linux into the modern sound land windows has been since vista. per application volume and speaker configs. per application outputs and recording inputs. it just works.

Re:meanwhile...

[drinkypoo]

But in practice it is non-viable as a replacement for all systemd is doing today as the developers on it admit

There's no need for it to do all that systemd is doing today. That in fact is much of what is wrong with systemd.

Re:meanwhile...

[amiga3D]

I thought the whole point was that SystemD was doing too much as it was. The main objection I have heard is that it has intruded into so many places it is not needed or wanted.

Re:meanwhile...

[hairyfeet]

Call me a tinfoil hatter if you want (just as anybody who said "they are monitoring our calls!" before Manning) but am I the only one that finds it funny that after Snowden lets out all the 3 letter agencies best spy tricks out of the blue a guy employed by Red Hat, who makes more than 85% of their money from 3 letter agencies, suddenly decides out of the blue "This crucial part MUST be replaced by this big creeping mess that will touch more and more systems!" and just as suddenly every.single.major.distro. just instantly jumps on this bandwagon even if it means telling their own users to fuck off? Even distros that are normally positively glacial about major changes like Debian? Doesn't that strike anybody else as odd?

Re:meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

> The funny thing is the people working on OpenRC threw in the towel over a year ago.

Are you *sure* about this?

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:OpenRC shows a modification date of 2015-01-24

http://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/openrc shows that OpenRC had a stable release on 2015-02-05. (Indeed, my amd64 server is running 0.13.9, built on that date.)

I would point you to recent OpenRC commit history, but g.o.gentoo.org is terribly slow at the moment, and the github repo doesn't seem to be all that official.

Re:meanwhile...

[gweihir]

Same here. As I posted in the last systemd-related story (slightly edited):

At this time I see:
- No technical merits of systemd that are important or critical, just some convenience issues
- Systemd is in hurried development, a stable feature set is nowhere in sight
- The development leads are known incompetents with inflated egos and no communication skills
- There are a number of design decisions that are very, very bad for security and stability

At the same time I see:
- Systemd is pushed strongly with emotional (not factual) arguments
    This is a coordinated and targeted propaganda campaign. A campaign focused on technical merits is not even attempted seriously.
- Systemd opponents are ridiculed, insulted and their arguments are not taken seriously
- Systemd is getting very hard to avoid

I can only deduce that there _must_ be one of or a combination of the following going on:
- Linux was getting too hard to hack and the intelligence community is pushing for systemd to fix that
- Linux did not generate enough support revenue Red Hat and this is intended to fix that by decreasing reliability
- Red Hat wants total control over Linux and systemd is their attempt to establish that

So if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, the most probable explanation is that it is a duck and hence I conclude that something nefarious is going on and the last three items are the most likely candidates IMO. I cannot believe that two known incompetent hacks with bad personalities can screw over a whole large tech-savvy community all by themselves. They must have significant, coordinated help, with significant propaganda and manipulation experience. Whether it is military PsyOps or just commercial PR, the effects are the same. And they are massively negative and destructive for Linux and its community if not repelled decisively.

Re:meanwhile...

[UberLord]

You're right, OpenRC cannot keep up because it's not a DHCP client, nor a binary system logger, nor any of the other things systemd has now assimilated.
It's just an piece of software which starts the system in a deterministic fashion using existing software that's been very well tested, such as sysvinit on Linux the respective BSD init on the BSDs.

OpenRC is just an init system, it will never be anything more than that. And why should it be? There are much better system loggers and network management tools out there than what systemd offers.

Re:meanwhile...

[gnupun]

Red Hat, who makes more than 85% of their money from 3 letter agencies, suddenly decides out of the blue "This crucial part MUST be replaced by this big creeping mess that will touch more and more systems!"

This systemd pdf article is pretty unremarkable except for what is written in big font in the 2nd page:

Another aspect of systemd is that it collects all output from processes that it starts.

Since systemd launches all processes, it can easily spy on all the process outputs and transmit that to whichever TLA it wants. This is a major spying attack.

Re:meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is the people working on OpenRC threw in the towel over a year ago.

I don't see any references either on Wikipedia or the official OpenRC web page that the people working on it threw in the towel over a year ago. Got any reference for this news?

But in practice it is non-viable as a replacement for all systemd is doing today

Of course a lean and transparent project is not doing everything that the kitchen sink blob is doing. If it was, it would not be hailed as the future of non-Redhat-derivative distrtibutions, but just another kitchen sink like upstart, launchd and whatever the Windows boot thing is called.

Re:meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

When they stop adding new, unneeded, and unwanted features?

Choice is good.

[ponos]

I think it is rather obvious that there should be a way to have more options. Competition is good, choice is good. Can't someone fork a version without systemd? Also, note that other distribution, like Slackware, don't depend on systemd, but the pressure is mounting.

Re:Choice is good.

[Grishnakh]

Can't someone fork a version without systemd?

I agree, choice IS good. However, what I'm seeing so far is a bunch of vocal whiners on Slashdot bitching about systemd, and no one actually stepping up to make a distro that doesn't use it. So what it amounts to is a few loudmouths telling distro maintainers they're wrong, even though the loudmouths don't want to actually do any work on distros themselves.

Re:Choice is good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if *all* you see are "a bunch of vocal whiners on Slashdot bitching about systemd", then you have a severe problem.

However, the fact that systemd comes with the "USE US OR FAIL!" dire warning (cf "if you don't use Windows, you can't use our ISP") and appears entirely engineered to intefere with everything on a Linux system, no matter how divorced from SETTING UP THE OS it is indicates that the proponents of systemd have one of two aims:

Give up on a sustainable Free Software OS.

Make systemd a required choice and silence all other options.

Given you only want to see complains as "whining" this indicates you do not want a free system. Pretending any discord against systemd must be illogic and panic is just your childish method for not having to argue against the problems highlighted. cf "you can't understand women's issues because you're a man".

Re:Choice is good.

[sjames]

Perhaps if you read a news site like slashdot, for example, you would have seen a few articles about people putting such a distro together. You might have even gone the extra mile and subscribed to their mailing list where you would see actual progress being made.

Nah, it's much easier to just bitch about people who didn't drink your cool aid on slash....HEY! Wait a minute!

I guess you just delete anything from memory that might keep you from dumping on people!

Re:Choice is good.

[kthreadd]

However, the fact that systemd comes with the "USE US OR FAIL!" dire warning (cf "if you don't use Windows, you can't use our ISP") and appears entirely engineered to intefere with everything on a Linux system, no matter how divorced from SETTING UP THE OS it is indicates that the proponents of systemd have one of two aims:

This article isn't even about systemd. You can fairly easily use Debian without systemd. This is about libsystemd which is a small library for interfacing with systemd if it is installed. It doesn't depend on systemd so you can have it installed without having systemd itself installed.

Re:Choice is good.

[thaylin]

Ah, another systemd complainer, who of course can't be bothered to have a real Slashdot account.

However, the fact that systemd comes with the "USE US OR FAIL!" dire warning

There's no such thing in systemd. Slackware (always the last to just on new trends) seems to be getting along fine without it.

There are CONSTANT statements that if you do not use systemd you will not be able to use primary Linux distros in the future, because all software will supposedly be gobbled up by it as a dependency... To try and now make out like those dont exist is pretty silly.

Given you only want to see complains as "whining" this indicates you do not want a free system.

systemd is LGPL FOSS, so it's just as Free as anything else. You seem to be using the appeal to emotion fallacy.

Again you are using half truths, or atleast feigning half understanding, or it may be possible that you dont understand the linux culture. It is pretty clear that he is talking about free in the sense of free beer, not free as in not paying for it.

Pretending any discord against systemd must be illogic and panic is just your childish method for not having to argue against the problems highlighted.

Because all the "problems" you cite are generally overblown or not problems at all. Please, show me where prominent distro maintainers are criticizing systemd and refusing to integrate it into their distros. The ramblings of some disgruntled random people on Slashdot are not equivalent to the opinions of experts in the field.

Now you are A) doing exactly what the quoted person stated ,pretending the problems are overblown or not problems at all, when there have clearly been (debug fiasco) and are issues. You then make it seem like the only person who can show a problem are distro maintainers. Maintainers are typically not the mass admins who have to support it, possibly trying to move the goal posts. There is no doubt that system d helps the maintainers, but it also harms the admins.

Re:Choice is good.

[lkcl]

Can't someone fork a version without systemd?

I agree, choice IS good. However, what I'm seeing so far is a bunch of vocal whiners on Slashdot bitching about systemd, and no one actually stepping up to make a distro that doesn't use it. So what it amounts to is a few loudmouths telling distro maintainers they're wrong, even though the loudmouths don't want to actually do any work on distros themselves.

that's precisely why i actually worked hard and risked destroying my business by losing access to all data on a critical business laptop, documented the process of removing libsystemd0 from it, and *then* wrote the article.

unlike the people you refer to, i actually *did something*.

then, i contacted the devuan team and informed them about what i had done, so that they may consider properly replicating what i'd done as maintainable debian packages. so they now have a way forward where previously they would have been worried that their efforts would result in many people still having to remove huge numbers of packages - desktop GUIs, sane-utils, cups-daemon, pulseaudio and anything that depends on it, clamav and many many more. i've demonstrated that you *don't* have to remove all those packages and that you *can* still have a functioning debian desktop... without libsystemd0 even being on it.

Re:Choice is good.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you risked your business in order to write this article?

Excuse me, but knowing this I would never hire you or do business with you. If you put your work machine at risk for such petty reasons, I can't tell how many times you are going to put your work in jeopardy again for ideological reasons. You are a loose cannon.

And here you are almost boasting about it so your comment sounds more important than it is. What would your employer or customers think if they read that? Are you really putting such a stain on your credibility just to win an internet argument? That's on you, pal. Use a less critical machine or a virtual one if you want to experiment, don't use your damn work machine. That's incredibly unprofessional.

That's for starters. Next is, why should Debian care? That library is probably there for a reason and they aren't going to backpedal just because a careless user gambled a bit. Seeing your tone I can already imagine the issue you filed, and honestly, don't be surprised if they dismiss it.

Doing something doesn't give you license for anything. Putting effort is not always rewarded. You are pretty much telling others how to do their job, and seeing that you are willing to put your own work at risk for ideological reasons, you are in no position to tell others what to do.

Anyway, good job keeping the systemd debate warm. I don't know what we would have done without your "sacrifice". Now get lost and get some working ethics. Someone who does this kind of risky process on a critical machine doesn't deserve respect.
Even less someone who uses that factoid as something to be proud of. That's just shameful.

Pointless

[solidraven]

While it all sounds nice, you do realize 99.99% of the population just sort of wants their computer to work. We don't strictly care too much about your love/despise of some piece of software you didn't pay a dime for, didn't invest any time in writing, and then whine about being used/write love stories to. This sort of behaviour is exactly why projects like a Linux distro, or god forbid GNU/Hurd, never make it to mainstream software. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. If you want the Linux eco-system to be accepted start by getting rid of Stallman, write some damned drivers, make an easy to use system that doesn't require 5 hours of Googling on how to get a laptop soundcard to work. If you invested half the energy you folks use for whining about systemd into actually making an alternative available you might actually get something done.

Re:Pointless

[Great Big Bird]

A thousand yeses could not match the rightfulness of this post.

Re:Pointless

[steak]

the problem is that for many, if not most, an alternative to init was neither needed nor desired. if anything systemd is taking talent away from developing your precious drivers in order to develop a solution looking for a problem.

Re:Pointless

[RightwingNutjob]

This post is the prime example of the way people on opposite sides of the debate are talking past each other. Given Linux's historical roots as a hobbyist OS, with almost all of the mid-late 90's spent as an academic OS that gradually worked its way into the enterprise environment by displaying commercial Unix distributions, a very large part of the folks who use Linux use it because it is "harder" to work with which is to say "easier" to tailor to their particular applications away from the desktop.

I use it on my desktop because I like it, but I learned to like it because I used it in scientific applications where I needed something I could customize and go deep on without being forced to follow Microsoft's or Apple's design decisions or having to fork over tens of thousands of dollars for VxWorks or QNX or HPUX or whatever and some more for ports of software that just happen to already exist in the GNU/Linux/FOSS ecosystem.

Did it take me a good couple of hours of googling to figure out how something worked? Sure. Lots of times. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me days to get the same result with Windows or Mac, if it was at all possible, becaues those were commercial OS's geared toward nontechnical consumers, with all the ambiguity and flexibility taken out. The most famous example is Steve Jobs deciding that the average luser was too stupid for more than one button on their mouse. But that's cosmetic. There are deep technical places where that sort of limitation does matter.

So why the bitching about systemd? Well, that core of people, few of whom really cared about widespread desktop adoption to begin with because their attention was spent on backend or niche scientific and technical applications, are seeing the push for Linux On The Desktop take the predictable direction of removing flexibilty from the system and, here's the important bit, forcing other software in the echosystem to remove flexibility to conform to The SystemD Way. Speaking for myself as a decade-long user of Linux, this came out of left field and looks like trying to solve a problem that never really existed for the Linux userbase by removing the very characteristics of the system that attracted folks like myself to use it for scientific and technical applications where Windows and Mac don't cut it and Big Blue and its equivalents are too damned expensive to be worth it.

So here's how we're talking past each other: you're trying to solve a problem I don't think needs solving, and you don't understand why people who use Linux now use it at all.

Re:Pointless

[solidraven]

First of all 1.5 billion, not billions. They also sell a lot more than just their flavour of Linux, which many people seem to forget. (Its all explained pretty well on their website.)

Granted the Stallman comment is a bit old fashioned, but still applies considering his recent whining. But I heavily disagree on the driver remark. If you mean old hardware, sure it has better support. On the other hand if you're running a recent system, lets say a laptop. Forget about having a smooth install unless you buy very specific models of specific brands. Even my ThinkPad, which was rated as having "good" linux support has shoddy WiFi drivers at best, the soundcard fails to operate without me performing quite a lot of manual configuration, and things like free-fall protection for the harddrive you can just sort of forget about. To give you an idea, I installed Debian on my laptop and it took two days to get it up and running. Keep in mind I am very familiar with FreeBSD so I'm not exactly unfamiliar with configuring this type of system. I then proceeded to install Windows 7, other than spending half an hour fixing the bootloader I pretty much only had to install the network driver and Windows did most of the work. On Linux I had to actively invest time in it, time that I could have spent doing other things. And the whining about Windows 8 is also rather old. While I must admit I still run 7 on my home systems, at work I use 8 on a daily basis. Just disable the charms bar, and have it jump to desktop at boot: annoying features disabled.

And so much became clear, but they should just shut up their clapper already or get to work.

Re:Pointless

[grcumb]

The systemd complainers are just a vocal minority. If they were representative of a large fraction of Linux users, then we would see several prominent distros not using systemd or making non-systemd versions.

You need to explain your reasoning here. You seem to think that minorities don't determine the outcome when it comes to designing FOSS. But the Freedom of FOSS is not populism. It never has been. It has always been the case that a vanishingly small minority of developers have decided the fate of thousands—and more recently, millions—of users.

It's a fact that Poeterring, Sievers and co. represent a tiny minority of Linux developers. Over 90% of the systemd code base has been written by 10 or so people. The groups that decided to include systemd in Debian and RedHat are also very small, and while Debian's is nominally consultative, they declined to send this particular decision to a popular vote.

So why do you think that numbers suddenly matter?

That's why the anti-systemd people are so pissed off: everyone else is just ignoring them.

It's not that people are being ignored. It's that 20+ years of historical evidence is being cast aside.

Make no mistake: What we're talking about here is a fundamental change in our approach to systems software. The distros have been dragged along for numerous reasons, some of them technical, some of them ideological. But to pretend that the demographic that is being left behind is of no consequence is disingenuous arrogance at best.

This is Linux: if they don't like it, they can just fork an existing distro, but do you see any of them doing that? Nope.

You know, I've done that before. I've worked for a company that developed a Linux distro purpose-built for people who couldn't manage systems for themselves. I still write the bits and pieces that I need, when I need to.

I'm not philosophically opposed to what you're suggesting here. I am incensed, though, that it should be necessary. As someone who so clearly doesn't understand the first thing about how the FOSS ecosystem works, you should have a care before you begin discarding the viewpoints of those who have gone before you, and you should think twice before presuming to suggest what's good for us.

HTH HAND

Re: Pointless

[Billly Gates]

You mean how Sun, Apple, and Ubuntu did not leave init behind years ago

Re:Pointless

[davydagger]

If you want the Linux eco-system to be accepted start by getting rid of Stallman

cold day in hell. To be honest, while I would like linux to be accepted. I'm not getting rid of Stallman, because if we start getting rid of people like him, the GNU/Linux community will just become more like the people we joined this community to get away from.

More imporant than getting everyone to use Linux, is getting everyone to change how they view the world. Stallman is a smart man, hes actually well spoken, and he digs in and sticks by his ethics, instead of taking a half-assed sleazy way out. He inspires confedence as a voice I can trust to be consistant and ethical, even when no one else is, and doesn't bow to pressure, or sell out core principles.

If we want to be more like everyone else, and start rejecting people for being ugly, and start accepting people who will sell us a bill of goods, and then find someway to fuck us over first possible chance, its not worth the added user base.

Also, Free software survives on community effort. Bringing in a bunch of hipsters, will simply bring in hoardes of people who do not contribute, but make demands, sometimes unreasonable, and might try and cause divisions, making work harder. Again, you'll talk about kicking contributers out, to make room for non-contributors.

write some damned drivers, make an easy to use system that doesn't require 5 hours of Googling on how to get a laptop soundcard to work.

OK, now you're trolling, linux has had better driver availability than basicly anyone else for the last 5 years. Your simply repeating problems people had pre-kernel 3, which are virtually unheard of.

I started running Linux because all my drivers just worked, as opposed to running XP at the time, where finding the right drivers was a fucking pain. Also, installing extra drivers on Ubuntu is easy, installing them on windows is hard, and installing them on Macs doesn't happen, at all.

Oh yeah, and all the codecs "just worked" too, I just clicked a box saying I didn't give fuck all about licensing. Now try doing that in windows, or even mac.

Or mabey that Ubuntu was the first desktop that had an App store on the desktop, even before apple. Oh, and it worked.

Or try installing windows on box vs mint/ubuntu/trisquel. Tell me what is easier.

Are your initials ESR?

Re:Pointless

[sjames]

Yes, since the systemd supporters didn't like sysvinit, they certainly should have forked a distro and put systemd in it. I wonder why they didn't just do that?

Re:Pointless

[devent]

First of all, Linux is already mainstream on servers, super computers, embedded systems, smartphones, etc. Second, what have Stallman to do with anything? If there would be no Stallman and GNU, there wouldn't be Linux. But today Stallman don't play a major role in Linux development anymore. Third, a Linux system is pretty easy to use. Just install it and it works. And lastly, no user care one bit about the discussion over systemd. Users are just using what is the default and if it works, it's fine. Sysvinit and systemd are just fine for users, it's only the hardcore old school users that are whining about systemd.

Re:Pointless

[grcumb]

I'm not philosophically opposed to what you're suggesting here. I am incensed, though, that it should be necessary.

So you think that you're entitled to getting software, free of cost, which is exactly the way you want it to be. The people who actually invest their time and effort into making these distros should, instead of doing what *they* think is the best course of action, do what *you* think is right, even though you don't feel like investing your time and effort into the project.

No, I think that people should follow my fucking example and listen to others, perhaps learning a little humility in the process.

I already told you I write FOSS; I scratch that itch when I need to. I have a fucking right to talk about this because I've walked the fucking walk. And I won't do you the indignity of asking whether you have as well.

I am trying to suggest that writing code is not the only useful role to be played in FOSS development. I am trying to suggest that we can't write all the code, all the time, so it behooves all developers to listen to their peers, if only to learn from their mistakes.

And now, you can perhaps go back and respond to the main question, which is why you think numbers matter in FOSS development?

All the people who maintain distros have considered and discarded your arguments. So why should I value your opinion over theirs?

Well, given that I told you that I've been a distro maintainer, your assertion is incorrect. Not all of us have discarded these arguments. Your assertion is a textbook case of No True Scotsman. But don't take my opinion in isolation; why not go ask Ian what his reservations are?

See, this is pretty much precisely my point. It's not that people's opinions are getting ignored. That happens all the time. It's that people aren't listening at all. And more to the point, that really critically important lessons of the past are being set aside merely because a small number of people have become convinced that they know a better way.

Again: in and of itself, that's not necessarily a problem. The problem here is that these particular people are wrong.

Re:Pointless

[sjames]

Pretty much the systemd advocates are running around pissing on everything in the store all the while yelling about how if you don't like piss you should buy simething that hasn't been pissed on. Of course if they see you head for a shelf, they'll do their best to run and piss on it before you get there.

Re:Pointless

[phantomfive]

While it all sounds nice, you do realize 99.99% of the population just sort of wants their computer to work

Then use Windows, or OSX. There are systems for people like you. Linux is for people who care about the internals of their OS, and want them to be clean.

It is a healthy thing we are having this conversation, because it will end up with a better system, or better understanding of that system. We could do without the insults and emotional rants, but those are part of being inclusive (that is, you shouldn't have to be a smooth-talker to participate in open source).

Re: Pointless

[Billly Gates]

Sun and Ubuntu did replace init, but that's all their replacement did. It didn't creep into other areas and try to take over all of system management.

How is upstartd, SMF, launchd, different than SystemD?

From brief overview the arguments it does everything is fud. No it does not route packets. It launches a process which communicates to the networking daemon inet for this. No it does manage kernel level threads. It is not a mini operating system at all and is just 300k lines of code.

SystemD is no different than the other event driven alternatives. It just requires relearning which people set in their ways get infuriated about.

With startupd, launchd, SMF, and SystemD you set the triggers for each event. No long scripts loaded with nested if/else statements galore or expensive proprietary software to mask this lack of functionality in init.

That is my answer to the grandparents argument there was no need for change. Kind of reminds me of XP users angry at MS for merely just 13 years of support and do not see the obvious need for security via ASLR ram scrambling & DEP, better process handling, better driver models, USB storage frameworks, and so on.

Things progress

Re:Pointless

[lkcl]

See, this is pretty much precisely my point. It's not that people's opinions are getting ignored. That happens all the time. It's that people aren't listening at all. And more to the point, that really critically important lessons of the past are being set aside merely because a small number of people have become convinced that they know a better way.

Again: in and of itself, that's not necessarily a problem. The problem here is that these particular people are wrong.

no, i disagree: i feel you pretty much nailed it but didn't realise it. the problem i feel really *is* that they're not listening... in combination with there being no alternative. if there was an alternative - a less disruptive one - then the fact that these key high-impact decisions were being made would *not matter*. why? because we would be able to use the alternatives and the people who were not listening could go screw themselves, and nobody would care.

it really *is* the fact that these people have such disproportionate influence and effect, and that they really *are* ramming "Their Way" down everyone's throats in such a cavalier way.

they may well perfectly be technically right (i have seen multiple analyses of systemd which indicate that they are not), but that *doesn't matter*, because it's the fact that they gave us no choice that is of far greater priority.

of all the arguments that i've seen, i have never seen one presented to the systemd team that gets this across to them clearly. the majority of arguments are either technical or abusive. it's only when you take a step back and think "what's really going on here"..

Re:Pointless

[raxx7]

Someone has to design the integrated circuits that allow you to post on /.
Be thankful we exist and suffer for you.

Re:Pointless

[raxx7]

You need to get out more.

Most servers run on Windows or Linux, mainly in the form of RHEL and SLES. Anything else tends to mean the hardware and software providers don't support you, which can be quite inconvenient.
Outside hobby servers, the number of servers using BSD or unsupported Linux distros (eg, I run Debian on personal systems) are a minority.

When dealing with systems with more custom hardware designs, things get varied. Cray XT6's compute nodes run a lightweight Linux installation, while IBM's BlueGene compute nodes run a custom OS with is only a few thousand lines of code.
But supercomputers we'd call clusters usually run RHEL or SLES or derivative with some add-ons. Comparing with BSDs is non-sense.

Among embedded systems with a multi-tasking memory protected OS, the most common sightings are QNX, VxWorks and Linux [full GNU/Linux, Android, WebOS, etc].
I can't recall the last time I saw a shipping product with NetBSD, actually. Despite it's fame for portability, NetBSD has been trailing Linux for a while and it lacks support for a number of modern embedded platforms. From the top of my head, there's no NetBSD support for AVR32, NIOS or Blaze architectures..
I don't think there's working support for FPGAs with embedded ARM CPUs either.

Re:Pointless

[ahodgson]

My servers run 100% software that I can get and modify the source code for when required. I'd say he's done a great job.

Re:Pointless

[medlefsen]

That article you linked is just awful. "Dear Leader Lennart Poettering"? I've been using systemd on Arch for years now, and very happy with the switched as it has a lot of nice features. I've been trying to follow the controversy (which completely surprised me when I first encountered it) but I still can't figure out what the big deal is.

Many of the arguments seem just flat out wrong. Systemd doesn't pull everything into pid 0, and it isn't being "forced" down anybody's throat. All of the various distributions are choosing to use it or not via their normal decision making processes. People keep talking about politics, and maybe I'm just missing it, but the only politics I'm seeing are from people like you who use highly charged, emotional language (and liken "opponents" to mass murderers) when talking about what init system to use.

The rest of the arguments I'm seeing, like the one in the link you posted, just seem like the most inane things to fly into such a rage about. So the systemd author thinks it's good to have a collection of systems libraries and tools that are uniform and high quality. That makes him a fascist liar? Somehow systemd is supposed to be anti-Unix or anti-Linux or something. I'm not sure how that makes sense. All of the other UNIX's I can think of do essentially the same thing (and more) and the idea that Linux is about small independent projects is odd given that Linux itself is a gigantic (and still growing) monolithic kernel, as opposed to Windows and Mac which are both hybrid Micro-kernels. Even more, most of the base userland for most Linux distributions is GNU, which is also a top-down managed project that aims for uniformity and high quality.

Literally the only argument I've seen that is even close to reasonable is that some people like text logs and journald is a binary log format, and fixing that requires adding one line to a config file.

Please, someone explain this to me.

Re:Pointless

[Microlith]

No they aren't.

Rather, the anti-systemd crowd is making up stories about the advocates, slinging vitriol and hatred, and engaging in pretty much any sort of abuse they can engage in towards the systemd developers.

I have seen few rational, logical, unemotional criticisms of systemd and lots and logs of reactionary bullshit.

Re:Pointless

[hitmark]

At this point init is a distraction.

At present time systemd cotains code for:

DHCP client
DNS client
Cron replacement
Firewall management
Inetd
Network management
Logind
Udev

And likely a fair bit more that i forget.

All of those however only really function if systemd is running as pid.

And frankly i think the logind element is what got people sitting up and paying attenotion. I certainly did. Because it replaced consolekit. And while consolekit could live on top of any odd init, logind is wedded to systemd as pid1.

And quite a number of freedesktop systems that previously relied on consolekit to privide session and seat tracking now depend on logind. Thus if you want to get your external drive mounting (and who knows what else) working, you need logind, and thus you need to be running systemd as init.

Turtles all the bleeping way down...

Re:Pointless

[gweihir]

That tired old lie again...

Re:Pointless

[Celarent Darii]

That is complete bullshit. Have you even looked at the source code of launchd and systemd?

Launchd actually is POSIX compatible which is why it has already been ported to FreeBSD. Systemd does not even consider POSIX compatability something to be desired.

If anything, porting GNOME will be a royal pain in the ass now. In fact many opensource projects like OpenBSD are writing shim layers to insure "systemd comptability" in order to facility cross compilation of Gnome Desktop.

When open source projects have to provide an emulation layer for an init system in order to port open source software there is something terribly wrong.

Re:Pointless

[davydagger]

I suggest if there is ever an event nearby where he speaks that you talk to him for half a minute, lets see how much of your view of said person is left standing. He's an annoying jerk who lives in the eighties who didn't yet get the memo that not everyone is spying on him or is strictly interested in what he thinks. But lets not get into detail about this one.

I didn't think you got the memo that they are spying on you. I mean we can pretend the snowden leak didn't happen, or be coy about the extent, or the fact that bits and pieces of been leaked for years, many times appearing on slashdot. We can pretend that he hasn't been the victim of a massive character attack against him.

You don't need a person like that to stand up for your principles, if you must find somebody to stand up for them I'd say go for Linus. He might be a jerk, but he's not an obnoxious paranoid unreasonable person.

Guess what, the world is full of jerks. Studies conclude that rude people are more honest. I don't find Stallman paranoid one bit, most of his "paranoia" over the years has been proven justified.

I think the real issue is you simply don't like what he has to say.

I have yet to see evidence of this statement. Every computer I install linux on, I must point out this is on recent hardware and often laptops, I usually end up having to fiddle with the driver settings because some person somewhere decided that having the default settings automatically loaded into configuration files was a bad idea.

my reaction has been just the opposite, drivers for all but the most obscure devices simply load themselves with no interaction. Except the full performance video card drivers. Thats as easy as installing a package and restarting.

Keep in mind the Windows driver figures out these things by itself, mostly because it doesn't have to take into account 50000 different possible locations for said configuration file.

I've always had driver hell on windows. Half the devices don't show on install, god help you if the ethernet driver doesn't work, and you can't find the install disk. Then you get to the 50,000 diffrent versions of the driver, the buggy piece of shit that comes with windows, or is it driver on the manufactures website which is poorly translated from cantoneese, into mandarin, into russian, into english, that took you 3 hours of searching to find because the company either merged, went out of business, or obsoleted the driver.

Also, drivers don't have configuration files in linux, they are kernel modules, most of them come with the kernel and are located in /usr/lib/modules/, and linux/udev simply loads them when it detects them, occationally you need to modprobe them and list them in a plain text file in /etc/modules-load.d

have fun also uninstalling all

Pretty sure they aren't.

oh, well you reminded me of someone else. Someone with the same strawmen, and bad arguments

Anyways, point still stands. I'd rather have people like Stallman than people like you. There are many reasons to be concerned about privacy, and its been proven that closed modules like DRM, and various phone home utilies exist, track users, and many times leave personal data out in the open, or on company servers, where identity theft is one of the fastest growing, hardest to catch crimes there is right now. We have a hostile government that doesn't give a shit, because they use the same methods to spy on is, and it makes it easy.

We don't need people who don't take Freedom, openess, security and saftey seriously. We also don't need people who are quick to make political compromises to fit in with powerful people, at the expense of the general populace.

We don't need "year of the Linux desktop". It does not benefit either GNU or Linux, we simply do not need it. It would be nice sure, but its simply not essential. More important is taking a stand and explaining to the rest of society why we do, rather than what.

fvwm is what I use, anyway

[TheGratefulNet]

every so often, I try out the various 'desktops' that linux distros offer.

every time, I give up, dislike all the procs running, mem wasted, cpu cycles wasted and all the crap that comes with the desktop. feels like bloat that should not be there, not for a 'simple' linux install.

I always laugh when people look at my display. I use a red/orange color to highlight the active window and grey for the inactive ones. there is no trash icon, no iconbox, no drag/drop. a short menu appears when you click into space (no clients under) and then pick which foreground rxvt opens up (all with black bg's).

I keep things simple. but I've been using this layout for literally over 25 yrs (starting with twm and using mwm for a short while, when motif was still popular).

not having a desktop is great. in all that time, I just have not been limited (at all) in what I can do, and things seem to be fast when I just run a term window, type what I want and it instantly runs.

unix was supposed to be simple. systemd is an abortion and one that most of us do not want.

good to see this protest post with a hand-tweaked system; but the fact is, we should NOT have to flip over backwards to remove a stupid should-not-be-there-anyway daemon and its evil libs.

Re:fvwm is what I use, anyway

[geoskd]

systemd is an abortion and one that most of us do not want.

That is simply not true. A VERY vocal minority do not want Systemd on ideological grounds (although I suspect it is more a matter of the new and different scares them, no matter what advantages it may offer)

The simple fact of the matter is that Systemd does everything, that other init systems do, at least as well, and it does some things that other init systems simply cannot do. If all the popular init systems today had been introduced at the same time, we would all being using Systemd, and no one would have given the others a second thought. The various technical committees have chosen Systemd because on the technical merits Systemd is simply better. There is no argument in favor of the former init systems that cant also be made against all technological progress.

FreeBSD

[byuu]

forcing people to consider abandoning the GNU/Linux of their choice and to seriously consider using FreeBSD

I did just that. It took a few weeks to figure out how to work around all the kinks (as FreeBSD is primarily targeted at the server space), but I'm really glad I did. I have a full Xfce desktop with all of the programs I was using on Wheezy before. Rock solid stability. Might be a bit easier to try PC-BSD to get one's feet wet.

I've also really grown to like all of the new features: ZFS for easy multi-disk mirroring, encryption, and snapshots; pf for firewall rules; etc. There's also DTrace, jails, etc. The integration with the base utils is wonderful, and the documentation is top notch. I've also found the new package system to work as good as apt-get (pkg install {program-name} and you're done.) I liked it enough that I've even started using it for my servers as well.

Definitely give it a try if systemd bothers you as well.

Re:FreeBSD

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Rock solid stability.

Good for you, but heed my warning. In the latter part of the previous decade we too ran FreeBSD. The guy who originally installed was a system admin with severe BSD lust and he singlehandedly pushed for it. We had a specific type of hardware where we could make FreeBSD panic and we could reproduce the crash at will. It turned out that a specific combination of CPU and network card that we had caused the panic. The issue was known and discussed about, but since the number of people who had this specific combination of hardware was low, basically the BSD forums all said "Sucks to be you. Don't count on a fix anytime soon." We migrated every FreeBSD box we had to CentOS (this is a free version of RedHat, for those who don't know) and abandoned FreeBSD. The problem did not exist in CentOS/RedHat. So as long as you don't have any exotic problems, good for you, but if you do, you may find that unlike in the Linux world, nobody may care enough to fix a show stopping problem you have.

Devuan and uselessd

[tepples]

Can't someone fork a version without systemd?

There's a fork of Debian without systemd, and there's a project to strip systemd down to the essential parts.

Ah, here it is

[SeaFox]

I thought something was off, feels like it's been a week since the last time I saw an article about systemd (not to be confused with all the other Linus articles that are turned into systemd discussions by commenters).

Re:Jeezus, give it a rest..

[lkcl]

Man, can we just give this a rest? My gawd, I can't believe people have the energy for this. Just go back to an earlier distro before all this stuff and enjoy.

we can't. the reason is simple: security updates and software updates will be incompatible. i actually maintain a hell-on-earth system for a client. the choice to do so is entirely mine, i have to point out. it's hell because i disagreed with putting KDE 4 in front of clients who are used to the simplicity of KDE 3.5, and i disagreed with moving them over to Gnome because, well Gnome is a different kind of hell (for me), involving being completely unable to remotely ssh in and hand-edit config files in a pinch. with KDE 3.5 it is still possible to do that.

so i ended up upgrading to Trinity Desktop, but this is after leaving the system running debian 6 for as long as possible. the upgrade was... fraught. then i had (in December 2014 - so only a couple of months ago) to buy and install a new printer (because we couldn't get the old one). that new HP printer wasn't recognised by the version of hplip that was on the system (3.12).

so i did an "apt-get upgrade hplip" - and what do you think happened? it said "to satisfy your request we require to remove Trinity Desktop and install KDE 4".

the reason was because the Trinity Desktop Team do *not have the manpower* to keep such a large old software base completely up-to-date with debian/testing. ... so i was forced to compile hplip from scratch, from source code! *fortunately* HP saw fit to include an extremely well-written and well-thought-out script that detected the OS, installed the build dependencies and generally got on with the job. i was really impressed.

now, the only reason i could contemplate this was because i am an experienced GNU/Linux systems administrator, but do you *really* think that the average person will be satisfied to "use older software" as you suggest?

this is the crux of the situation: that we *are* forced to such extreme polarising choices. and that's why i did what i've done - demonstrate that it's possible to remove libsystemd0 which is being shoved down our throats. i *don't care* if libsystemd0 is good or not: i object to it being forced onto people.

Choice is good.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, but I am having a hell of a time getting over the initd martyrs. Everything I see about this is written like some kind of revolutionary maniphesto.

And this is the IMPROVEMENT, before it was just endless vitriol towards Lennart Poettering whose crime was "writing a software package for free", even though he's not the one with the end-say on what packages go in the distribution.

If they all move to devaun the debian community is going to be getting rid of some of its most vitriolic and insufferable members. I imagine concentrating all those people in one place is going to be disaster down the line but at least they're going to be gone from the forums of the systemd-based distros

I'm not worried.

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Here is what I think will happen:
        At some point Poettering will piss off Linux enough to get him banned from submitting to the mainstream kernel.
        To deal with the problems of no active maintainer of systemd contributing to the kernel, Linus will write his own boot system.
        This system will work better then the sysinit system, but not be anywhere near as onerous as systemd.
        Peace will return to the linux landscape.
 

Oblig Frasier

[Tridus]

http://imgur.com/gallery/VWUgs...

Sums up how I feel about yet another systemd flame war.

I'll say this for systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

It got me to put FreeBSD on my to do list for 2015.

Contrary to opinion...

[Junta]

All the criticism of systemd is not strictly from a luddite perspective. There is a population that appreciates meaningful advances (Wayland, btrfs, even some facets of systemd), but doesn't like some of the compromises systemd has employed to achieve their goals. Getting stuck in a point of time before systemd is not a desirable result, and in fact systemd might be able to win over some detractors if they recognize criticism and make sensible technical solutions to those rather than continuing to say 'oh everyone loves it except some impossible to please luddites'. For example, journald could embrace native text logging with external binary metadata and deliver all the goodies they provide and quell all the (justified) bitching that human readable logging is a second class citizen in their model.

They may not be able to accommodate all the objections (e.g. the amount of complexity they *must* do in pid 1 to have guaranteed comprehensive service management without blindly applying namespace isolation everywhere that would make a system look even weirder/risk breaking some services), but they could come a long way.

The issue for many of us is that things are being implemented that go beyond what systems administrators can follow along without understanding how to be a more robust software developer (and even then, there's some loss of convenience in analyzing things compared to an interpreted language). Systemd design shifts focus on specialized tools that are better at their specific task, but less reusable in similar contexts. If I started with syslog and learned 'tail -f' will let me watch logs, then I have acquired knowledge that can be used the next time I encounter logging output. If I learn 'journalctl -f', then that knowledge does not transfer to the huge number of other applications that do logging. It's a small example of things that in aggregate pose a significant challenge.

An administrator faced with a 'classic' design won't know everything about the system, but can get far with 'set -x', 'find', and 'grep' because the configuration, logging, and much of the 'glue' code is in clear text, and communication between programs usually hits the filesystem in fairly specific ways. Now with things like systemd and dbus, 'invisible' things happen (well, overly generic communication channels and compiled code). When the kernel implements new awesome stuff, it frequently manifests in sysfs, which is nice and discoverable. Advanced functionality that adheres to the 'everything is a file' and generally presents and accepts simple utf-8/ascii data. Not everything in the kernel does that, sometimes it creates obscure devnodes with ioctls instead, but it's a common and good practice in kernel land.

In general, we already have a system that embraces many of the design principles observed in systemd and actually does a decent job of making the concepts work: Windows. Even with a great deal of talented investment over the course of decades, when a Windows system goes off the reservation in certain ways, no one will be able to bring it back because of how complicated the integration of the various components. While certain concepts can be specifically be done better (e.g. journald does better than windows event framework), the emergent behavior of Windows that becomes impossible to overcome by administrators isn't really due to those specific things.

Re:Contrary to opinion...

[lkcl]

In general, we already have a system that embraces many of the design principles observed in systemd and actually does a decent job of making the concepts work: Windows. Even with a great deal of talented investment over the course of decades, when a Windows system goes off the reservation in certain ways, no one will be able to bring it back because of how complicated the integration of the various components.

your post is particularly insightful - i hope it is recognised as such by moderators. i wanted to emphasise what you said, because NT 3.5 and 4.0 used a recursive login system based on DCE/RPC function calls. a "domain" logon was (is) actually no diffferent from a "local" logon: the only difference being that the SAM database was running locally (and was marked in the registry as being the same name as the machine). as a result of this, there were actually simple registry hacks for NT 3.51 to turn a workstation into a Primary Domain Controller!

so thanks to DCE/RPC, all that happened with a Domain Logon was that the incoming function call would make an (identical) recursive *outgoing* login function call to the nearest PDC/BDC/Trusted Domain. that Trusted Domain Controller would, in turn, on receipt of the incoming function call, make an (identical) recursive outgoing function call to the nearest PDC/BDC... and eventually, through this chain, the answer would be "login success or fail".

incredibly neat, and technically brilliant... but the actual number of people in the world who really truly understand that must be limited to under a hundred people at most. *not all of them* work at microsoft....

Re:What a load of crap

[kthreadd]

This is not even about systemd, it's a about libsystemd which is just a library for interfacing with systemd. You can have libsystemd installed and still don't have systemd itself installed. Debian has built some of their packages so that they depend on libsystemd, so installing them will bring libsystemd with them. Not a problem if you don't want to run systemd, but if you for some reason can't live with dpkg-query -l | grep systemd printing even a single line then this is apparently a problem.

Re:Why wasn't there a systemd fork of Debian?

[resfilter]

debian uses simple release engineering like unstable -> testing -> release. there are other projects that work in a similar way, freebsd is fairly similar. they have commonly done gigantic system-wide break everything for months type changes in freebsd current.

they don't need to fork to test experiental things, they just do it in unstable first. then when they can't find problems, it goes into testing. eventually testing becomes a release.

considering systemd has been in debian in an experimental capacity for nearly 3 years, i think they've done enough testing to consider it stable.

it's nothing like debian/kfreebsd, because changing to a completely different kernel is nothing like changing an init system. not to mention that debian/kfreebsd was expected to have a very long steep development curve with a very small audience, whereas systemd is something that is already proven to be a fairly stable thing. redhat has been using it by default for half a decade.

i'll never use systemd, though. not because i don't trust its stability. the way it works and is configured reminds me of DJB software. makes sense, works well enough, but is wrong on a level that is difficult to explain.

Re:Why wasn't there a systemd fork of Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Normally when there are experimental changes made to a software system, a branch of some sort is created, the experimental work is done in isolation there, and if the changes are working well then the branch is folded back into the mainline version of the software.

I'm confused as to why this was not done when integrating systemd into Debian.

Why did something as experimental and potentially disruptive as systemd go into mainline Debian so quickly?

Because the sudden almost-universal rise of systemd is about politics, not robust system design. That should be obvious to you and anyone else who notices the strange hurry to adopt systemd. Poettering and his circle-jerk fanboys are simply very good salesmen. If Debian went with your suggestion (that is, treating systemd like they generally treat any other major changes), that would mean lots of time to think about it. Time to think about it vastly increases the chances that people will realize that systemd offers few real-world advantages to make up for its tremendous complexity and abandonment of the Unix philosophy. That's a win for sound system design, but no good for politics.

Red Hat and its cronies (like Poettering) simply has far too much influence over the development of Linux distributions, much more than any single corporation deserves to have. Large parts of the core system aren't community-developed and haven't been for a long time now. Politics is hard when there are many distributed developers and you must convince most of them. Politics is easy when there are a few top-down managers and you know what they want to hear.

Pulseaudio misconceptions

[DrYak]

I didn't like (and never used) Pulseaudio either. If I wanted to play sound over a network I'd share my media directory.

Networked sound playing is just an incident of pulseaudio being a sound router. It's a nice feature, but that's not what pulseaudio was basically written for.

There are lots of situations where sound is routed to something which isn't the usual ALSA driver:
- lots of headphones/microphones now are USB. They are not another channel on the same soundcard, they are a completely different sound driver. Switching when pluging a headset is not something which is trivially done in ALSA without special support of software.
- bluetooth, which is VERY common on portable devices (but also might be usefull on dekstops) isn't even a kernel driver. Sound is handled by a deamon communicating with the bluetooth stack. It has much more in common with networked sound than with ALSA.
- recording the output of another program becomes much more trivial if there's a sound router handling the redirection, instead of needing some special support in software.

What I wouldn't do is run an unnecessary audio layer requiring application support - and that can do nothing else - in the form of a sound daemon I never wanted and didn't ask for.

Pulseaudio doesn't require any special support. It can present an ALSA target to any ALSA-enabled software. Most current software don't even have a pulseaudio plugin, they just open the default ALSA device which happens to be one pulseaudio listends to and that just works.

Software mixing you say? It's called dmix.

Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space* ?! Do you run your video decoder and webbrowser there too ?
I prefer to run unnecessary things like sound as daemons in userspace. Thank you very much.

I moved away from Windows and towards open source years ago in order to have choice.

And you're still free to disable pulseaudio and use dmix instead, if you want.
Now indeed, for an init system, it's a bit more complicated to leave complete choice to the end user. Some specialist distro like Gentoo are able to offer you to switch between their default OpenRC and whatever you want.
But the amount of work and risk of bugs in untested paths is rather high. So don't expect other distros to offer instant switch between systemd and upstart.

I will have that choice whether or not most major distributions gargle the Poettering cock.

Instead of being vulgar, maybe you should ask yourself why so many distributions are switching to systemd.
Maybe, part of the reason would be that systemd solves actual real world problems that these distributions need fixed.
Maybe that's because systemd people and Lennart Poettering actually ship code, instead of just sitting the whole day bitching and cursing on internet forums.
Maybe if you didn't spent all your energy on whinning about systemd, and actually tried to *DO* something, to *FIX* the problems, and write an actual good solution, maybe your solution would be the one picked up by distros.

Also please try to avoid making confusion between the actual piece of code that runs as PID 1 (which is indeed confusingly called "systemd") and all the other pieces of code that add the functionnality mentionned in all systemd articles (these pieces of code are all members of a project which is also called by the same name "systemd", but all pieces of code are completely different deamons like "networkd", "journald", etc.). In other words, it's not the PID 1 that get stuffed with innapropriate functionnality. It's the people who wrote the PID1 that are also writing other daemons for extra functionnality, all different parts of the same project.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space* ?!

Because it is real time process with hard guarantees. It's ridiculous that my home media PC from 1995 desktop running SLS could play audio without studdering unlike my new Dell laptop from 2015 with an i7 running Ubuntu. The CPU clock speed alone is 33 times faster (3 GHz vs 90 MHz). Playing audio is something we need to do well. Getting rid of low quality userspace code written by inexperienced people and moving it into well written and better maintained kernel code could would be a win for users. pulseaudio is an embarrassment.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[raxx7]

The other poster was wrong: dmix runs in user space. Linux never had kernel space mixing/resampling, unless you patch it with OSSv4.
Which means your post is bullshit.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[Barsteward]

"Because Lennart Poettering managed to make his friends doing GNOME development make GNOME depend on systemd, " - if you do some research, you'll find he actually enabled the software remain compatible with Consolekit but Gnome chose not to use it. read this for more info http://www.linuxvoice.com/inte...

its quite amazing (and disappointing) just how much mis-information is out there and that people do no research before jumping on the bandwagon

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[statusbar]

Software mixing you say? It's called dmix.

Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space* ?! Do you run your video decoder and webbrowser there too ?
I prefer to run unnecessary things like sound as daemons in userspace. Thank you very much.

... Because I need less than 125 microseconds mixing processing latency (12 samples at 96 kHz) so that in-ear monitor mixing for live performance can be useful - requires a total latency from microphone to wireless receiver to CPU to processing to wireless transmitter to in-ear monitor of less than 5 ms. Until Linux user tasks can be scheduled with this kind of hard real time timing accuracy, mixing real time audio in user tasks doesn't cut it for live audio. So I myself am required to do my mixing and processing for real time audio either in the kernel driver, in a RTLinux task (in kernel space), or in a Xenomai task (see xenomai.org ) running at a higher priority than Linux.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[drinkypoo]

Networked sound playing is just an incident of pulseaudio being a sound router. It's a nice feature, but that's not what pulseaudio was basically written for.

That's unfortunate, because that's the only thing it actually provides that we didn't have before.

lots of headphones/microphones now are USB. They are not another channel on the same soundcard, they are a completely different sound driver. Switching when pluging a headset is not something which is trivially done in ALSA without special support of software.

Another thing which can be done with a small shell script.

bluetooth, which is VERY common on portable devices (but also might be usefull on dekstops) isn't even a kernel driver.

But BlueZ does provide an ALSA driver.

It has much more in common with networked sound than with ALSA.

Except, you know, that the sound comes through an ALSA driver.

recording the output of another program becomes much more trivial if there's a sound router handling the redirection, instead of needing some special support in software.

Special support in software? what do you think pulseaudio is?

Pulseaudio doesn't require any special support. It can present an ALSA target to any ALSA-enabled software.

When that works.

Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space*

That's OK, there is userspace dmix for the paranoid. But you avoid a context switch by having your sound mixer inside your kernel space. However, if you want to use a floating point mixer, it has to be userspace anyway because politics.

And you're still free to disable pulseaudio and use dmix instead, if you want.

Some applications are just using pulseaudio directly for audio now.

Instead of being vulgar, maybe you should ask yourself why so many distributions are switching to systemd.

Because upstream software requires it, for poor reasons.

Also please try to avoid making confusion between the actual piece of code that runs as PID 1 (which is indeed confusingly called "systemd") and all the other pieces of code that add the functionnality mentionned in all systemd articles (these pieces of code are all members of a project which is also called by the same name "systemd", but all pieces of code are completely different deamons like "networkd", "journald", etc.).

No. I can't ignore the various pieces which are required. I can ignore the non-required bits, though.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[davydagger]

you can. you can re-compile the kernel for low-latency realtime by dicking around with compile time options. you can run jack instead of pulse, and you can have a fairly decent pro-audio production setup.

That said, we are talking about consumer grade setups, and the default of 350hz timer, and pulse works just fine for that.

Doing something that much more hardcore, re-compile the kernel, I do believe debian and ubuntu provide low-latency and realtime kernel along with packaging for related programs, and guides do exist for other distros.

I do believe if you are a highly trained technician, you can be expected to know your tools better than the average consumer who doesn't want to fuck with it. If you're getting paid, its also job security.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[statusbar]

Try the settings - standard kernel options for linux don't work for this.

The only options that work today are using driver level code for audio processing or a real time Xenomai task.

Please support Thomas Gleixner via the Linux Foundation to help to fix this limitation of Linux: http://lwn.net/Articles/572740...

Until then, all high performance low latency audio processing in linux needs to not use any user level tasks.

Jeff

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[walshy007]

Jack existed prior to, and has superior functions for (except for one use-case, high latency low power) everything that pulseaudio does.

When pulseaudio was in development I observed some conversation between poettering and a lead jack developer. It became quite clear that poetterring had little to no idea why some of the design decisions being made at the time were quite crazy. Admittedly some aspects were fixed over the years since pulseaudios adoption, but the immense pain they created from the beginning was unnecessary.

It really did come down to a combination of "not invented here" and "tablets are the future! fuck desktops" when pulseaudio was being made.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[thegarbz]

Another thing which can be done with a small shell script.

Oh please stop. I can't read much further than this. There were many use cases for linux audio which were either completely absent or plainly broken before Pulseaudio matured (I won't say before it came out, because frankly it was broken when Pulseaudio came out too).

If you think supporting the range of various event driven realtime changes to the sound destination (i.e. I did something as mind bogglingly complicated as plugging in my headphones while watching a movie) then I'm sure there wouldn't have been an endless list of complaints about the state of linux sound. As far as a general user was concerned, sound was effectively broken. But it's good to know you could write a shell script to fix everything. (I won't draw a comparison to sysvinit here, woopse too late).

If the problems were as easily solved as you claim the distros would have done it years ago. Except they didn't and were so very keen to migrate to something which did have this functionality that they released Pulseaudio waaaaay before it was ready for primetime (happy to draw a systemd comparison here).

But feel free to keep wearing your rose coloured glasses as you lament about why we have the things we do know.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[DUdsen]

It is quite well known systemd was a political backed decision and not a technical one. Plus I will never understand how it made so fast to stable.

It never became stable, look at their bug list then compare with any other stable init.

Upstart have 10 part timers and dont see a lot of critical bugs sitting around, sysV and OpenRC is the same story, systemd have a bug queue the size of that for windows and more then 500 active developers, And every distribution adapting is have are facing more turmoil then they've seen since the late 90ies.

At the end it might pen out but since systemd is redhat 3rd in just as many major releases it's still possible that a 4th init system get's adopted around the time 8 comes along, or that systemd gets put on a diet, and reduced to just a init system.

It's political but it probably have as much to do with the irrelevance linux bestowed of the old giants at Xopen and FSF then it have to do with redhat.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[silentcoder]

You're forgetting the other major player of the time: BeOS. Well I say major in terms of technical achievement, not market share sadly.

BeOS was able to play an MP3 while browsing the web and chatting on IRC and still burn a CD without making a coaster (which, at the time, even on Linux you could usually only ensure by never doing ANYTHING else if you were burning disks because buffer underruns were fatal).

BeOS achieved this incredible feat not by magic, hell it didn't even have significantly better performance than Linux - what it DID have was a massively better PERCEPTION of performance due to a few things.
Firstly - it was a true microkernel, much like what HURD had wanted to be, but less ambitious and actually completed and these tasks were all being handled by very well threaded processes managed through that kernel.
Secondly it's scheduler was tuned perfectly for desktop use, including the ability to interrupt kernel IO tasks to maintain reactivity on the desktop and mark some threads uninterruptible (like the CD burning thread so you wouldn't get underruns).

The latter factor - a scheduler tweaked around desktop performance with interruptible kernel threads did make it into linux but not until several years later. I remember the difference it made when I first compiled a kernel the, then still experimental, new scheduler and for the first time I could copy a large directory full of files in KDE without the entire desktop basically freezing until the kernel had finished the file IO operation I just kicked off.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[DrXym]

The Amiga's Agnes GPU was a glorified blitter and the Paula audio "acceleration" was just a sound chip that had DMA so it could be kicked off to play sound stored in a memory buffer. Neither would help decompress an MP3 - the CPU would still have to decode the next chunk of audio in memory and trigger the audio chip to begin playing it. I'm not sure why anybody would want to play MP3s on an Amiga though and I very much doubt it left much CPU to do anything else, even on a 68030 or 68040 CPU.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[drinkypoo]

Oh please stop. I can't read much further than this.

You want me to stop, while you're being the fanboy. Why don't you stop riding Poettering's dick?

There were many use cases for linux audio which were either completely absent or plainly broken before Pulseaudio matured

Wrong. There was just one, hardware mixing was broken at the time. But now it works, and there is no reason for pulseaudio to exist.

If you think supporting the range of various event driven realtime changes to the sound destination (i.e. I did something as mind bogglingly complicated as plugging in my headphones while watching a movie) then I'm sure there wouldn't have been an endless list of complaints about the state of linux sound.

You accidentally the whole thing, there.

Plugging in headphones while watching a movie is something that worked fine under ALSA, if your hardware was worth one tenth of one shit. I know, because I used to do that before pulseaudio was a thing.

Most of the complaints about Linux sound were "hardware mixing doesn't work", then we got dmix, and then there was no real reason to have pulseaudio. But we still have it.

If the problems were as easily solved as you claim the distros would have done it years ago.

They did, but everyone and their mom started using pulseaudio, and then it had momentum.

Except they didn't and were so very keen to migrate to something which did have this functionality that they released Pulseaudio waaaaay before it was ready for primetime

Yes, some people acted lazy. Now you want to follow that up with more lazy, and damn the expense!.

Let's give this some relevance.

[HBI]

I was in a meeting last week with some representatives of a large defense contractor and Microsoft. The two of them don't get along well. The defense contractor people (not the MS people) brought up the whole systemd thing as an equalizer between Windows and Linux, and not in a positive way.

The bottom line is that I have a hard time believing it, but Microsoft is actually making inroads in the server market again. Linux adoption where I work is pretty much stalled, and the things it is used for are mostly virtualization hosts, rather than stuff that actually performs a function. While the systemd thing is just a tiny blip compared to the other reasons this is happening, this shit does not help.

I'm also not going to waste my own capital evangelizing the OS if significant engineering effort is going into something that is, at least in the short term, reducing the reliability of the operating system. That's a stupid idea and pissing off your evangelists is, too. Everyone forgets where the market share came from...and figures that it is fungible with whatever stupid follow-on idea they have, once they have said share.

Red Hat is about to learn this the hard way.

Re:Let's give this some relevance.

[Zarjazz]

Red Hat is about to learn this the hard way.

I hope so. We've put our upgrade from RHEL 6 to version 7 on permanent hold basically because of systemd and all other associated forced-down-your-throat changes they have made. This is no longer a seamless, non-intrusive upgrade unlike every previous major release.

For desktop users, yeah I understand it's probably a non-issue for them. But if you are a sysadmin managing thousands of servers with possibly tens of thousands of VM's on top of that it's a major issue.

Re:Let's give this some relevance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat is about to learn this the hard way.

I think they already know. The dozen or so times I've talked to them since October about systemd-created problems, their employees seemed completely fed-up. Their patience is done. They know they screwed their customers, and their support is having a very hard time keeping up with attempting to help customers. Swallowing stderr and higher-priority syslog messages makes it very difficult for them to troubleshoot problems.

Why are distros moving to systemd?

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat.

And the design of systemd which means systemic and wideranging changes in many packages making "not systemd" a large change in programming. If systemd were not being pushed by RedHat but by, for example, a bit player like Gentoo, then the widespread changes would stop it working. See upstart for another example of a wideranging change that wasn't pushed by a big enough player. But once it starts being done, either others have to backport or fork or conditionally code in systemd use or they have to use systemd.

And at that point, it's not "choose systemd", it's "choose not to maintain a fork".

A very different kettle of mackerel.

Re:Why are distros moving to systemd?

[TheCarp]

Wait so, distros are using systemd because redhat chose it.... meaning a big enough player pushed it? However, this is NOT the case for upstart, which, is what Redhat chose last time and is replacing systemd with now?

Re:Why are distros moving to systemd?

[thegarbz]

Ubuntu wasn't a big enough player? That's news to me.

The reality is that upstart solved problems that systemd did too, then Ubuntu not being of the NIH RedHat type said hey, no need to continue to pour effort into our own init system, we could just switch to another.

The thing about forks is they are often created as a need to address something which does not exist. This is why I am watching this entire debacle with a very keen eye. Base on the talk on online forums one of the following 3 will happen:

1. Linux user base will decimate in favour of BSD.
2. Devuan will become a leading distribution and will quickly find it's way onto every server in the world as admins refuse to work with systemd.
3. Life will go on because people don't put their money where their mouth is, and systemd isn't quite bad enough for people to actually start supporting alternatives instead dedicating all their energy to complaining on the internet.

To anyone who hates systemd, donate to an alternative or dedicate some programming time, or package management, or any one of the other many things that go into maintaining a fork.

Deliberate destruction by a secret agency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps there is an underlying secret purpose in implementing SystemD, similar to the hidden purpose in saying TrueCrypt is insecure and trying to get people to use Microsoft encryption software.

Re:Red Hat Network

[kthreadd]

The other day I found out that it's impossible to use yum on a Red Hat machine with an expired RHN subscription. It proved quite unpleasant to work my way around it, as wget was not installed.

Of course you should have a valid subscription, otherwise you won't get security updates. It happens every now and then that I run into people that run five year old RHEL installations which they have never updated because they either are too cheap to pay for it or have never heard about CentOS.

Pretty soon we'll need a valid subscription to start daemons, something made possible by "improvements" like systemd.

It don't understand how you made that conclusion.

This subscription model is becoming quite the rage (Microsoft, Adobe, Red Hat, etc) and this is leading real fast to absurd situations like in the novel from Philip K. Dick (Ubik) where the guy has to pay a few dimes each time he wants to use the door of his apartment.

You have to pay if you want to continue to get binary software from Red Hat, you can always get it in source form even if you're not under a subscription.

Give it a rest

[MSG]

We aren't all "good at coding," but we know what init system we want.

We aren't all "doctors," but we know we don't want vaccines.

We aren't all "scientists," but we know global warming is a hoax.

I cannot be the only one sick of seeing this crap posted over and over. systemd is being implemented in distributions because a) it is good and b) the people making that decision are the ones qualified to do so.

Re:Give it a rest

[Todd Knarr]

The people making that decision don't own and operate my servers, so they're not qualified to make that decision for me. I depend on those servers. I do not want them dependent on software that hasn't been in production service for long enough to have all the issues wrung out (and there are always issues when new software goes into production, I don't care how much the dev team may wish otherwise). I'll look at systemd late this summer and see how it's shaking out, and make any decision about adopting it next fall at the earliest.

Mod parent down

[Prune]

Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space* ?! Do you run your video decoder and webbrowser there too ?

Because musicians also use computers, and latency -- which is higher if you're going through user space -- is a big no-no. While some latency is acceptable, any trained musician will easily hear 5 ms latency if he's recording, especially with voice. Since FIR filters and the hardware audio chain already add latency, there's really no room for the mixer to add much. Pro audio is actually a major application for real-time Linux kernels: https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind... And saying "but only musicians need this" would totally miss the point that almost everyone starts as hobbyists and amateurs, and the capability should be there already, especially because it's not a big problem to have it -- in-kernel mixing has been available for a long time and works fine.

Re:Do people who post on lkml actually know englis

[lkcl]

Really, someone should get a dictionary for their birthday and read the definition for "unilateral" lol.

that's in.... *counts on fingers*... 9? days? :)

ok so let's look it up... a random google search shows these:

1. Of, on, relating to, involving, or affecting only one side: "a unilateral advantage in defense" (New Republic).
2. Performed or undertaken by only one side: unilateral disarmament.
3. Obligating only one of two or more parties, nations, or persons, as a contract or an agreement.
4. Emphasizing or recognizing only one side of a subject.
5. Having only one side.
6. Tracing the lineage of one parent only: a unilateral genealogy.
7. Botany Having leaves, flowers, or other parts on one side only.

yep. definitions 1 through 5 are perfectly relevant. unilateral. meaning that pottering made the decision and (2) did not consult any of us. he claims to be "listening to users" yet (4) in fact ignores everything they tell him and carries on regardless. he has therefore violated the implicit software freedom contract (3) between users and developers who choose to be of service to others.

so yeah. it would appear that yes i really do know english, if only by accident.

Devuan releases pre-alpha ISO. FK systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/...

re all,

Here is a pre-alpha sneak preview of Devuan at the current state of
affairs. It is my valentine to Franco: despite we probably never met in
person, I love him. He is really dedicated to this project and putting
hard work in it. I also fell in love with another VUA, whose name I
won't tell, but he is the one hosting the gitlab, running very well.

http://mirror.debianfork.org/d...

http://mirror.debianfork.org/d...

http://mirror.debianfork.org/d...

do not use this in production, this is an internal preview (not even an
alpha) for the Devuan enthusiastic community and for those wondering if
we'll really make it: yes we will.

Journalists and DWN editors reading: please do not link this. We will
have another more public release soon :^) Let it be a private valentine

Also please note that this is not yet rebranded, so it says Debian
almost everywhere. Didn't find the time for that yet.

default user is 'devuan'
password is always 'devuan', also for root

sources are those of Debian 8 RC1 jessie
plus the mods here: https://git.devuan.org/groups/...
and packed with the SDK https://git.devuan.org/devuan/...

happy hacking

--
Jaromil, Dyne.org Free Software Foundry (est. 2000)
We are free to share code and we code to share freedom
Web: https://j.dyne.org/ Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf
GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10
Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil

---

Pretty fucking boss.

Re:Why wasn't there a systemd fork of Debian?

[walterbyrd]

Love the parroting of corporate propaganda, right out of Microsoft's playbook: "anybody who doesn't like vista/win8/ribbon/ooxml is just an old fuddy-duddy luddite, all the cool kids love our latest super-cool technology."

> As far as this "UNIX Philosphy", fuck that shit.

If you hate it so much, use ms-windows. I mean it. If you want a proprietary system that controls everything with one big super-complex blob, then use ms-windows and be happy, and leave everything UNIX-like alone.

BTW: the UNIX philosophy is not just dogma, it has a practical purpose and has worked very well.

JACK is better for you.

[DrYak]

... Because I need less than 125 microseconds mixing processing latency (12 samples at 96 kHz) so that in-ear monitor mixing for live performance can be useful - requires a total latency from microphone to wireless receiver to CPU to processing to wireless transmitter to in-ear monitor of less than 5 ms.

If low latency in professionnal audio setting is your target, then there's already specialized software for that: JACK.
It's specially designed for what you want, and as widespread usage in the field.

Or might as well go for a hardware solution.

Use the right tool for the right job. Otherwise you end up trying to cram extra requirement into a tool which wasn't designed for it.

There are even special distribution which are geared toward pro needs and are tuned with this kind of tools.
(Dynebolic as an example)