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Ubuntu To Officially Switch To systemd Next Monday
jones_supa writes: Ubuntu is going live with systemd, reports Martin Pitt in the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list. Next Monday, Vivid (15.04) will be switched to boot with systemd instead of UpStart. The change concerns desktop, server, and all other current flavors. Technically, this will flip around the preferred dependency of init to systemd-sysv | upstart in package management, which will affect new installs, but not upgrades. Upgrades will be switched by adding systemd-sysv to ubuntu-standard's dependencies. If you want, you can manually do the change already, but it's advisable to do an one-time boot first. Right now it is important that if you run into any trouble, file a proper bug report in Launchpad (ubuntu-bug systemd). If after some weeks it is found that there are too many or too big regressions, Ubuntu can still revert back to UpStart.
Interestingly enough, 15.04 is deep into the Beta status and due for release next month. A major change, such as swapping out the init daemon, should be done in Alpha, and far before any Beta release. Certainly not in the month before a release!
Why is everything connected to systemd pushed out in such a hurry? Why isn't systemd getting proper time for review?
Here is the Ubuntu 15.04 release schedule:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividV...
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
As a Windows user, picture one executable that runs as LocalSystem, that handles all program starting, has network I/O, handles virtually all security items and authentication... and is all completely new code, with little formal testing and no auditing. Then find it foisted on you with no way to transition to it. Now, when you install a program, it breaks, since the old services mechanism has been replaced.
Now find that MS forced this on you in an update, so you now have to wait until your applications are compatible with the new code.
Finally, when people ask MS about this change, MS's response would be essentially "L2P."
Oh, don't ask about the security ramifications about this large monolithic blob of unaudited code that runs in superuser mode and has full network access. If a remote root hole appears, you should have had a better firewall anyway.
It's like hastily cobbling PulseAudio into the works so many years ago, but dramatically worse. Ubuntu's its own worst enemy, and you're foolish if you slap 15.04 onto bare hardware on day one.
When you pretend to be a foolish version of someone else, in order to mock them, you only make yourself look foolish.
If you really have a valid point to make, argue against your opponents' best points. Don't make an ad hominem attack against a caricature of the opponent.
Linux has become an utterly chaotic mess that isn't fun anymore because most of my time is spent relearning the bullshit that comes with software designed by consensus
Actually Linux always was an utterly chaotic mess and that's precisely what made it so fun. It's the waves of Windows envy followed by waves of Mac envy which have sucked the fun out of it.
Still it's all relative and I'd rather use Linux than one of the more commercial offerings by a very long way.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
what exactly is systemd and why do we keep hearing so much about it?
Part of the problem is that its poorly defined. It's touted as a replacement for the init system. (The system that manages other services. So for a windows user it's core functions as the services host process -- its where you can start and stop services, determine which startup at system startup. Stop them. See which are running. Restart crashed services, etc. It does startup in parallel so it's faster than the traditional init system.
But doesn't just replace init, it relplaces cron (the task scheduling system -- "scheduled backups and such" not "cpu thread scheduling"; it replaces the event logging system, it replaces the login system...
The unix philospophy is for components to be small and do one thing well and to to let users build a system out of the different pieces they want. systemd is big and tightly integrated and more of an all-or-nothing and that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
And the main valid criticisms of are (IMHO)
1) Binary logging -- the advantages of the systemd logging system are apparent, but there are disadvantages too; users should have
2) It potentially creates a layer between kernel and the rest of the system that becomes entrenched and irreplaceable. As applications going forward will develop dependencies on the rich services of systemd it will become impossible to replace systemd with anything else, except maybe a fork of systemd. (This rubs a lot of people the wrong way.)
3) the rich service layer and tight integration stifles innovation; for example assuming systemd has traction someone can't make a "better cron" now, because that functionality is part of systemd. They can't make a better init-only system because applications will be relying on all the other services of systemd.
4) it gets between the rest of the system and the kernel, and in many cases you have to work through systemd and can't just go to the kernel. This has its good points, but also its problems and further entrenches systemd.
Perhaps GNU/Linux systems with systemd should properly be called GNU/systemd/Linux systems to emphasize the point.
I don't personally hate systemd; I recognize a lot of thing it does are good for large parts of the linux user base. But I do agree with the 'haters'; that its not modular enough and that leads to several valid complaints.
I doesn't help that the egos involved on all sides are large and uncompromising.
Even better than that, the "Contrarian Party" who rage and hate about the ACA so much is also the party that designed, developed, and ran test implementations of it (in Mitt Romney's state, while he was Governor). It wasn't until Obama said "Okay, that idea you guys have is a good one, we'll do that" that they suddenly turned into frothing opponents of it at every turn.
Oh wait... ACA was tested and vetted before implementation. I guess that means it's not like systemd at all.
The SystemD crowd are windows devs who hate 8 so much, they finally decided to get into linux. Sadly, they want linux to work like windows, so they foist their shit into it. It does make boot times faster: something sysadmins usually don't give a shit about since you don't reboot servers. Red Hat wants systemD because it will let them abstract linux (the kernel) away to the point where they can control it instead of "the community". In addition, several genuinely nice tools, UUID for disks, are being folded into SystemD so, in order to get those tools, you *must* also use SystemD. Essentially it's being bundle in with other services.
Sadly, SystemD is not well tested enough for most people running linux on a server to trust it especially since the guy who wrote it wrote PulseAudio and people are still having issues related to that piece of shit.
Pros:
* Boots fast
Cons:
* When it breaks, you're fucked
* Obsoletes 20-30 years of accepted best practices and knowledge of how to use linux tools
* No real new features
* Is network connected and running as superuser
* Is unaudited
* Is virtually untested
* Was written by a raging moron
* Is completely unneeded by a large section of people who have run linux for a long time
Essentially, it's the Windows 8 of the *nix world
Ubuntu is geared more toward people who don't care much about managing the boot details. So I think it might make sense for them. I chose my distro based on how much control it gave me. And luckily, they still seem committed to OpenRC. When it comes to booting, keep it simple!
The push not on technical merit but on emotional arguments is unmistakable. This is not what should be happening with Linux. It is just the same propaganda BS that is all too common in the commercial space and has been used to hype many bad and broken products.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
While I agree, the style of pushing it is similar. And while such a despicable style does not reflect on the product being pushed, it is in itself a problem, as you can push arbitrary bad or evil things this way, as systemd nicely demonstrates. And "by their methods thous shalt know them" does have merit, even if it is not universally true.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Nice. This person does not even understand what logs are for and why it is critical to make sure they get to disk uncorrupted if possible at all. A decent system will achieve that as long as the disk is still up. systemd apparently does not even try to.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have watched a few Poettering videos and he comes off as a massively arrogant douche bag (but I am a fan of Linus and RMS so *shrug*).
How do you feel about Theo? I think there must be some deep psychological understanding you can come to based on people's reactions to Linus, RMS, Theo, and Poettering, but I have no idea what.
All four of them are massively arrogant, though three have earned it and deserve some respect, but only one is a douche bag.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Thanks for confirming my point: "Systemd is pushed strongly with emotional (not factual) arguments".
It does not get more obvious than you just were.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Doug, Ian, and Robert are standing next to a cliff. Doug says "let's jump!"
Robert says "No!!" and lists all the bad things that could happen. Doug yells at Robert "You're just a Contrarian! Besides, I got the idea from your Uncle Mitt!" Robert retorts "Sure, but that was just jumping off of a sand pile. Also, I never liked that idea, none of my other relatives liked that idea, and none of my friends liked that idea. And I dislike this idea even more!"
Ian mumbles "I don't know. I want to think about it."
"Too late!" screams Doug, while grabbing Ian and Robert and jumping.
As they lie in a broken heap at the bottom of the cliff, Doug stumbles to his feet, having used Ian and Robert to break his fall, and points at them "Remember, we all wanted to do this!"
Systemd has laudable goals and people do want it. That's why it's been adopted, because some people want what it does. "It fills a use case people have" is what Linus says. And that use case happens to be the one that desired by the people responsible for building distros.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Resistance to the ACA mobilized fast and hard, from the moment it was proposed, and court challenges to it have proceeded non-stop from the beginning right up to this year. There are fundamental flaws in the ACA (like insurance companies and employers still being the gatekeepers to healthcare) but they don't need "careful vetting" to spot.
I cannot believe that two known incompetent hacks with bad personalities can screw over a whole large tech-savvy community all by themselves.
I don't think it's that bad, they don't have to convince the entire 'tech-savvy community,' they only need to convince a very small subset of that community, the people who are writing init scripts for distros. And that subset is very small.
Systemd knows that very well. They've worked very hard to make init-script writers happy, and have been very responsive in making changes. If you look through the Debian mailing lists, you can see this......there's no need to blame the NSA or others. They're just following a useful principle: find the ones who have power to do what you want, then make them as happy as possible. The systemd people have done that.
You mean they took the people that actually have to deal with init scripts and made them happy? Instead of making something good that would make people using init scripts happy?
Wait. What is the difference?
Um, I disagree with the way you've worded just about everything but you've basically hit upon it with #3: this is about control and standardization, and working around the GPL (kinda like tivo-ization).
It doesn't come up that often in the arguments as it's gone under the radar, but if you notice systemd keeps pulling in more and more aspects of the OS (networking, virtualization, etc.), and that's because they want to be able to package commercial software without worrying about linking issues for commercial customers because everything passes through their shims.
Soon they'll be able to have an app store/linux where they're selling working photoshop running in a DRM'd way but because everything is being passed as messages to the various libraries instead of accessing them directly. Their corporate customers end up with a locked down environment doing an end-run around the GPL and we get a technically open-source OS filled with a bunch of software passing through redhat as an app-store.
Having config management isn't a magic bullet. Slackware's regression testing of updates, and the quality of their backports are sorely lacking. It's a great distro to tinker on, use on a personal machine, but across any production network? You crazy.
Funny-looking duck you have there.
Almost everything you say there is blatant misinformation. Way to spread the FUD. Pretty amazing stuff. Especially your idea that there's no technical merit to systemd, and by extension replacing upstart, which replaced sysv.
90% of systemd's suite of utilities are not part of init, and not even required or used by most people and their distros. It does, though, make containers and cloud a lot easier for those who want to do that. Certainly makes administration better on servers.
Before you launch into this sort of diatribe, would it hurt to learn a bit about systemd and what it's doing than to simply parrot old FUD and unsubstantiated claims (and I use that word rather loosely)? Wild conspiracy theories make all of us in the Linux and Open Source world just look silly and hurts all of our credibility.
Simple: I am not against progress if it has merit. Systemd has none.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
anti-systemd attacks have no merit, they are just a list of vitriolic personal attacks on the developers and lies about what systemd does or can do.
If systemd had no merit, it would not be adopted by so many distros
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)