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Haiku OS Will Get New Service Manager

Posted by Soulskill on from the probably-won't-be-as-contentious dept.

jones_supa writes: Axel Dörfler writes in his blog that he is working on a replacement for Haiku OS's current shell script based boot process. It would be replaced with something more flexible, a solution similar to OS X's launchd and Linux's systemd. While there is still a lot to do, the new project called launch_daemon is now feature complete in terms of being able to completely reproduce the current boot process. Since the switch to their package manager, there was no longer a way to influence the boot process at all. The only file you could change was the UserBootscript which is started only after Tracker and Deskbar — the whole system is already up at this point. The new service manager gives the power back to you, and also allows arbitrary software to be launched on startup. Alternatively, you can prevent system components from being started at all if you so wish. Furthermore, it allows for event based application start, start on demand, a multi-threaded boot process, and even enables you to talk to servers before they actually started.

3 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Hogwash! Poppycock! Rubbish! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The people complaining about systemd aren't complaining because it's different. They're complaining about it because it's utter shit!

    For crying out loud, systemd's most vocal opponents are career sysadmins with the most experience. These are the people who are least bothered by change! They're completely accustomed to it. Change has been the story of their careers. In fact, they're the biggest supporters of change, when it's done right.

    When you're a professional admin who has dealt with various versions of Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, OS X, Linux, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and many other OSes each week for years or decades, change itself is a total non-issue.

    People have a problem with systemd because it has so often done something that no init system should ever do: prevented the operating system from fully booting.

    Read through the mailing list archives of the major Linux distros that have switched to it. Read through the bug reports. It's disturbing how many problems people report with it. It's especially disturbing when a project like Debian, which for so many years prided itself on a very high level of reliability, has its reputation tarnished thanks to its awful transition to systemd.

    The opposition to systemd has never been about change itself. It has been about changing to something that experience shows is rife with serious problems.

    The opponents of systemd would gladly accept change, but this change needs to bring improvements, not problems.

    1. Re:Hogwash! Poppycock! Rubbish! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problems with systemd go far beyond mere bugs. They are flaws with its design philosophy and architecture. These aren't fixed with simple patches and some testing! The only way to fix these is by completely throwing away what's there, and starting from scratch, doing things completely differently. When you start doing this, then you end up with the sorts of init systems that we've been using very successfully for so many decades: init systems that are truly modular (a bunch of non-portable, highly dependent libraries and daemons like systemd consists of is not true modularity), that do not use binary logs (practice shows that text logs are the only sensible option), and that only focus on providing an init system (unlike systemd which tries to handle logging, logins, network configuration, time-setting, virtual terminal support, and so many things totally unrelated to an init system). Maybe Linux does need a new init system. But that init system sure as hell isn't systemd, or anything like systemd!

    2. Re:Hogwash! Poppycock! Rubbish! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ...and that only focus on providing an init system (unlike systemd which tries to handle logging, logins, network configuration, time-setting, virtual terminal support, and so many things totally unrelated to an init system). Maybe Linux does need a new init system. But that init system sure as hell isn't systemd, or anything like systemd!

      I wish people could stop just for a second to think of systemd as an init system. It's not. Even the systemd web site says it's not, it says "systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system." Treat it like that, a number of essential system components, one of them happens to be an init system. It's not the init portion of systemd that handles all the other things you say it does, systemd does. The init system itself in systemd handles only init and nothing more.