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Debian 8 Jessie Released
linuxscreenshot writes: After almost 24 months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which will be supported for the next five years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team. (Release notes.) Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie. Screenshots and a screencast are available.
here we go...
Guess it's time to change my email address...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
The screenshots aren't looking bad but that Gnome quest for removing menu bars goes a bit far. What if you find yourself with no free space in a file manager window to right-click on. I tell people to use "Edit / Paste" or "File / Create a new folder" in that case.
Stop. That's the problem, right there.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Just did an install in a vm. No. There is no option to choose an init system. systemd is default. If you want to use sysvinit, you have to do it via a pre-install script which basically means, netinstall.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
People be aware of some caveats upgrading. Been testing it in the last year, and using it since news year eve in less critical systems in production. systemd has to be pinned to -1 or your servers will get upgraded to it without any interaction from your part. Beware also that Apache configurations change. Some configurations might get broken. libjpeg8 was missing and docker.io still is; backports may solve this. Apache configurations changed a lot. Be also aware that things get installed by default, for instance I had to delete rpcbind from most of my servers. Be also aware open vmtools gets a little confused after the upgrade and needs to be upgraded explicitly.
After using and developing Debian for 18 years, this is the first release I have no plans to use, all thanks to the gnome and systemd idiocy. It hasn't been a nice experience, seeing a system build up with loving care by so many people over so long being willfully trashed by a small handful of people. I for one have no interest in being RedHat's bitch; if I wanted to be, I'd be a suffering Fedora or CentOS user. Debian has lost its independence and freedom.
I've been using FreeBSD for nearly 18 months now, and rarely boot up Debian on my systems or VMs. Going back 5 years, I'd never have imagined this is the way things would play out. Tragic.
I've used it in production for five years (5!) now. Just because Debian is slow to adopt new technology doesn't mean that it's untested. People have used systemd in real-world production systems on other distributions since 2010, and has been around for a couple of years before that.
Really, that long? Funny, because according to the systemd Wikipedia page the initial release was March 30th, 2010. The Wikipedia page itself wasn't started until August 2010, and Poettering's systemd announcement, where he mentions having an "experimental" init to compete with upstart (which had been around years before systemd) is dated April 30th, 2010.
That means that, no, it wasn't around a "couple years before" 2010, and wasn't added to any distro repositories until a year later, so your claim to have been using it on "production systems" for "five years now" is just as much bullshit as the claim that systemd existed years before 2010.
The only way you've been using systemd in production that long is if you're from the future and using systemd-timetraveld.
Ok. Yes. It seems to work. Just append this to the end of the boot string after pressing tab and you'll have a sysvinit system:
preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core"
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Anecdote 1: I've just timed a Debian Jessie single CPU hard disk based VM install with BTRFS as the filesystem, a GNOME 3 desktop where the user is auto logged in boot and where an autostart script records the time. Here are my rough systemd and sysvinit results (times are from after the kernel core finished to when the GNOME script ran):
sysvinit (apt-get install sysvinit-core)
First boot: 20 seconds
Second boot: 18 seconds
Third boot: 19 seconds
systemd (apt-get remove sysvinit-core)
First boot: 15 seconds
Second boot: 16 seconds
Third boot: 15 seconds
sysvinit averages 19 seconds, systemd averages 15.33 seconds. In this case it does appear that systemd booted the system faster.
Anecdote 2: Same as above but where the VM's disk is sitting wholly in RAM. Time for sysvinit dropped to 5 seconds and the time for systemd dropped to 4 seconds.
My personal guess is that the more you are running, the slower the disk the more likely systemd is to benefit you. You don't say how you did your comparison though or what type your "disks" were. If your comparison was between different versions of Linux distro then it could simply be that the previous version did less (which is always the fastest way to boot)...
Another anecdote: a few years back I saw Slackware systems at a University converted over to systemd. Boot times (which involved waiting for multiple NFS mounts) went from over three minutes to down to less than a minute because more of the waiting was done in parallel.
So now you're worried that someone will be able to hack systemd by making it exit a poll(2)?
systemd pid 1 may have sockets opened and bound but it doesn't read from them. How are you going to hack that?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Really? It's the apocalypse?
Look, I don't like systemd from a design perspective. But it does do one or two things really well: It's standardized init scripts between each distribution and it has full process control. It can track a process no matter how many children it makes.
It does way too much other stuff too. The binary logs are dumb. It's not small and modular. Yada yada.
The biggest problem which needed to be solved was full process management and none of the other projects were really getting anywhere.
It sucks. It shows that Redhat controls way to much. Other projects weren't able to get in. Yea I know. But it's not causing systems to go unstable and crash all the time. Put some perspective into it.
No, you don't have to do it with preseed. Just sudo apt-get install sysvinit-core. At any time, for the entire lifecycle of your installation. You can switch back with sudo apt-get install systemd-sysv at any time too. Change back and forth at will; I have, and whilst I initially had big problems with it, Debian's packaging now even has filled in the gaps that the systemd project themselves seem uninterested in fixing, such as full crypttab support/compatibility that the old sysv/cryptmount ecosystem had supported.