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Lennart Poettering Announces the First Systemd Conference
jones_supa writes: Lennart Poettering, the creator of the controversial init system and service manager for Linux-based operating systems has announced the first systemd conference. The systemd.conf will take place November 5-7, in Berlin, Germany. systemd developers and hackers, DevOps professionals, and Linux distribution packagers will be able to attend various workshops, as well as to collaborate with their fellow developers and plan the future of the project. Attendees will also be able to participate in an extended hackfest event, as well as numerous presentations held by important names in the systemd project, including Poettering himself.
I am currently porting multiple RHEL 5/6 servers over to other distros without systemd. Going to RHEL7 is just not a viable option for us.
Similar for workstations, where we have stopped ordering Dell N systems with Red Hat, and instead order them with Ubuntu (which we then wipe out - Ubuntu just because it's the cheapest option).
We have multiple in-house daemons, devices and mounts that need to start, stop, and yes, crash without an overseer interfering. Not handing off control is a must. Humanly readable logging is a must. No chance of a buggy startup process taking out the entire startup is a must. Not having buggy software auto-restarted is a must - if we wanted that, we'd use inittab. That we don't mean that we don't.
The amount of red hat subscriptions we have has gone down by around half since RHEL7 was releaseds. This is not a coincidence. Red Hat seems to still be on the cloud bandwagon and thinks that we'll eventually buy their cloud services. Sorry, but disregarding your customers' explicit requirements does not make that exceedingly likely.
Even IBM has abandoned ship, and gotten out of the business of selling RH systems. That this occurred when RH switched to systemd is not only a coincidence. They saw the devil on the wall and pulled out of the certified midrange market at the right time.
They will not invite someone to speak on that, but that is something I'm working on.
In brief, the good:
* Systemd makes it easier for distro maintainers to write startup scripts, which is something a lot of them wanted.
The bad:
* Poor understanding of interfaces by the lead developers.
* Poor understanding of portability by the lead developers.
* Poor understanding of separation of concerns.
* Scope creep (there is no reason Gnome should depend on systemd).
* Binary files are a symptom of idiocy......more specifically, binary/text is not something that should be decided by the init system.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Just wait until "kdbus" is in the kernel.....
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
it also solves the problem with fossilized development of subsystems like init and logging,
Not a problem, and also not actually a thing. Several competing init systems which didn't bring baggage with them already existed, but Lennart is a real NIH kind of guy so he didn't start with one of those. Stable init and log daemons are features, not bugs.
systemd, as init and process manager, actually takes on the coordination responsibility that lacked previously. It is way cool how "namespace" isolation and kernel Capabilities(7) are integrated
You do realize that cgroups is a thing you diddle with very small commandline programs, right? And by making directories? These are things which could be done in init scripts. Most distributions use standard init script libraries where such initialization can take place. It didn't require a whole new daemon; at most, some minor changes to again one of the existing competing init daemons would have been a fine place to start. Not tying it to a specific log daemon is the really important part, though! A whole new init system would be a whole lot less odious without a whole new log daemon with serious design deficiencies — especially breaking the human-readability component of the Unix Way that made Linux (as an imitation of Unix) successful to begin with.
y dismissing every systemd feature and everything systemd does as "bad"
No, what is being dismissed as bad is the NIH attitude, the proven lack of maturity (in all senses) of the primary developer and maintainer and his code, and the dismissing of what is tried, tested, and therefore true as old, outdated, and obsolete.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are actual good technical reasons why systemd is made like it is and why systemd-logind is part of the systemd project.
There are no good technical reasons. Having a window manager depend on a particular startup manager is poor design, there's no way around that.
You are misinformed. CK2 and systemd-shim are alternative implementations of the systemd-logind API (or at least the subset of the API Gnome/KDE actually need).
I discuss that here. If you think I am misinformed, I will look into it more deeply.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'd rather have a system that does it better without having to resort to scripts all over the place to make up for deficiencies in the system.
You seem to be making the tacit assumption that everything works perfectly. If I am debugging a system then I would much prefer to deal with scripts (usually all in one place or otherwise easily found) than have to try to debug C and C++ code and XML schema. See Theodore Ts'o comments that were linked to above.
It reminds of me dealing with Microsoft systems (many years ago from the NT days, maybe they have changed since then). *IF* everything works pefectly then it is fine but as soon as you are in the mode of tracking down problems then it becomes a nightmare. This is why I made the switch from Windows-NT to Linux when I was doing sysadmin at a university. If I wanted to use a system that was like that then I would use Windows. This tacit assumption that the system was designed perfectly so there is no need for any intervention is one of the reason people don't want to give up init scripts on their Linux systems and replace them with systemd.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin