Systemd Rolls Out Its Own Mount Tool (phoronix.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: I'm surprised this hasn't surfaced on Slashdot already, but yesterday Phoronix reported that systemd will soon be handling file system mounts, along with all the other stuff that systemd has encompassed. The report generated the usual systemd arguments over on Reddit.com/r/linux with Lennart Poettering, systemd developer and architect, chiming in with a few clarifications.
Lennart argued it will greatly improve the handling of removable media like USB sticks.

Comments

heck with linux..

[Anonymous Coward]

we should all just install systemd and be done.

Re:heck with linux..

[sconeu]

Systemd would be a a great OS... all it needs is a decent init system.

Re:heck with linux..

[93 Escort Wagon]

Shouldn't that be gnu/systemd?

Re:heck with linux..

[Provocateur]

it comes with a convenient tool to place it on a bootable USB stick, and it's called
uwontbootin
to avoid confusion with unetbootin, of course.

Re:heck with linux..

[DeVilla]

They'll start implementing their own compiler soon.

Re:heck with linux..

[sexconker]

Should've gone with unotbootin.

Re: heck with linux..

[DeVilla]

Yes, but that compiler won't do.

Re:heck with linux..

[Pepebuho]

Systemd is a Cancer

Re:heck with linux..

[epyT-R]

well technically this would be an underlord that answers to systemd.

Obligatory parseltongue

[Anonymous Coward]

Lennnnnnnarrrrrt Potttttterrrrrrr

SystemD?

[Nethead]

I keep hearing about this SystemD thing. Is this the OS that Linux runs on?

Re:SystemD?

[110010001000]

I think it is like Emacs without the editor part.

Re:SystemD?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be funny if it weren't true.

Re:SystemD?

[AHuxley]

A lot of well working, smaller programs and aspects of the OS are now part of something new.

Re:SystemD?

[fahrbot-bot]

I think it is like Emacs without the editor part.

Emacs has been around since 1976 -- I've used it almost daily since 1985. Let's see if systemd is still here and useful in 40 years.

Re:SystemD?

[lucm]

I think it is like Emacs without the editor part.

Emacs has been around since 1976 -- I've used it almost daily since 1985. Let's see if systemd is still here and useful in 40 years.

You're like the senior management at Blockbusters who saw Netflix as a minor niche player who presented no threat to them. Or like the managers at Polaroid who thought digital cameras were just a fantasy.

Systemd is a cancer and it will keep spreading until the host is dead. Just like cancer it's not malicious, it sincerely believes it knows better than the healthy cells it's infecting, but that doesn't make it less lethal.

Re:SystemD?

[Alomex]

Your post seems to presume that emacs is (1) still around and (2) useful.

I think both of those statements are rather questionable. A few legacy users do not qualify as "still around" and even though I used emacs for nearly ten years back in the 90s, today you couldn't pay me enough for me to use it. I've read elsewhere that this seems to be the norm, and people have migrated to graphical environments for most purposes falling back on vi when they only need a text editor.

Re:SystemD?

[Archfeld]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Just in case you were NOT trolling...

Re:SystemD?

[KermodeBear]

There's an Inception joke to be made here.

What ever happened to the principle of single responsibility? Where a tool does one thing and does it well, and you put tools together to do whatever?

Re:SystemD?

[chipschap]

You need to check out the various emacs related mailing lists, which are very active with a lot of people involved.

Emacs is still around, and more useful than ever.

Re:SystemD?

[fisted]

errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?

Most defnitely so.

Re:SystemD?

[Anonymous Coward]

hello there mr stallman, any comments about renaming gnu/linux into systemd/gnu?

Re:SystemD?

[Z00L00K]

It's more like an operating system that runs on top of Linux than anything else.

Re:SystemD?

[donaldm]

I think it is like Emacs without the editor part.

Emacs has been around since 1976 -- I've used it almost daily since 1985. Let's see if systemd is still here and useful in 40 years.

Well systemd has already six years under its belt and quite a few major Linux distributions have adopted it.

While we are at it lets start another emacs verses vi flame war (mid 1980's), since I have been using both since 1980 although personally I prefer vi mainly because it is on all Unix systems by default (emacs is not). On second thoughts lets not.

Re: SystemD?

[Entrope]

x86_64-systemd-linux-gnu, HTH, HAND.

Re:SystemD?

[thegarbz]

Depends on what you mean by lethal. Cancer causes severe degradation in the host to the point of death. The same can not be said about the systemd systems which are happily running along just fine.

Re:SystemD?

[Curunir_wolf]

Where a tool does one thing and does it well, and you put tools together to do whatever?

That's called an engineering team.

LOL No. The engineering team designs the types of hammers, the worker decides which hammer to hang on his toolbelt.

Re: SystemD?

[RoccamOccam]

Wasn't that Kodak and not Polaroid?

Re:SystemD?

[jeremyp]

Not heard of systemd-emacs? It has the advantage that all your editing sessions are spawned directly off process 1. No need to su anymore to edit /etc/passwd.

Also, you can have dependency management so when you invoke systemd-emacs, systemd will make sure that the emacs vi emulator extension is installed first.

Re:SystemD?

[SadButResolved]

SystemD the New World Order!!! Getting people to act against their own self interests, its what we do..

Re:SystemD?

[l3v1]

"What ever happened to the principle of single responsibility? Where a tool does one thing and does it well, and you put tools together to do whatever?"

It does one thing [questionably] well, problem is that that one thing is called "everything" :P

Re:SystemD?

[CronoCloud]

Leaving discussion of emacs and systemd (though I run a systemd distro) aside, I did have to comment on this:

although personally I prefer vi

vi? What are you, some suspender wearing greybeard who still uses an ASR33, and calls bicycles "velocipedes"?

vi is archaic and arcane. What you should be using is....vim. ;-)
In fact vi users these days probably are actually using vim-minimal.

Yes I know, vi as vim-minimal is installed by default, on Linux anyway, and vim-enhanced isn't. /me waits for a low 4 digit UID guy to extoll the virtues of "ed".

Re:SystemD?

[ausekilis]

Systemd is a cancer and it will keep spreading until the host is dead. Just like cancer it's not malicious, it sincerely believes it knows better than the healthy cells it's infecting, but that doesn't make it less lethal.

You've just described every brilliant villain in film, comics, and television in the past 50 years. Magneto genuinely believes in what he's doing. Kahn was trying to save his people at any cost.

Next on SyFy: "SystemD, the final countdown"

Re:SystemD?

[Junta]

The one threat I don't get is people who claim to dislike systemd sometimes claim they will go to windows instead. Windows in general is managed in a very systemd like way, except more shoddy. I'm not a fan of how SystemD is going personally, but if it *had* to be Windows or Systemd, I'd pick systemd in a heartbeat.

Re:SystemD?

[some old guy]

Putting "tools" together forms an engineering team? Many maintenance techs would agree with that.

Re:SystemD?

[lucm]

Everything in the software world is moving toward micro-services and loosely coupled components lately, but with Linux and Systemd it's the exact opposite. Isn't that funny?

Re:SystemD?

[gmack]

The headline is misleading. It's not actually built into SystemD it is an (optional) addon utility. It may be great or it could end up like the DHCP server her made that no one in their right mind uses.

Re:SystemD?

[DeVilla]

/me waits for a low 4 digit UID guy to extoll the virtues of "ed".

You've got me boxed in a corner here.

Re:SystemD?

[DeVilla]

That's why the emacs is a great OS... joke isn't just a joke. Emacs is a platform with a bunch of tools I'd hate to lose, like ediff, hexl-mode, org-mode and even simpler things like isearch, flyspell-mode and rectangle editing.

Emacs is a contain for lot of tools and you can switch between. It can even shell out. You can write one-lines on the fly. Getting back to Inception, a good bit of emacs is written in emacs

Re:SystemD?

[Ol Olsoc]

Depends on what you mean by lethal. Cancer causes severe degradation in the host to the point of death. The same can not be said about the systemd systems which are happily running along just fine.

The guy with his systemd cancer equality is modded +5, and you write the actual truth and its at 1. There are Linux people out there as bad as the Microsoft shills.

Re:SystemD?

[Aighearach]

Great! What can we do to speed up this process a bit, its about time that linux started to replace some of its aging, creaking old architecture with new tools liberated of old, out of date practices and effectively made a system which took care of the things I really dont give a shit about.

Good news, you don't need to do anything! Even with mobs of neckbeards in the street holding signs, work hasn't slowed down at all. And if you need paid support, you can always buy or recommend it from RedHat. That's the best way to directly support this stuff, since most of the work is being done by people while at their day jobs.

I'm at the other end; my computer is my work, I don't mind spending time configuring it, I do care how it is configured... and I want the software quality to be high.

Right now, mount/umount hot swapping sucks pretty bad though. Little progress has been made in the past 20 years. I get lots of zombie mounts, where different parts of the system think the wrong disk is in the drive. A couple weeks ago I was watching a DVD on my computer. It stopped half way through; no error message, vlc just stops playing and exits. I try again, stops at the same spot (about an hour in). I take the disk out, clean it (no visible problems) and try again. Same thing. Finally, I try "sudo umount /dev/sr0" and sure enough, it thought the disk had been mounted, though the actual disk was not mounted. Then it played all the way through. Similar errors happen in other places. The problem is that there isn't a standardized system for handling hot-swap. It is just done by whichever thing is installed, and none of the other things have an authoritative way to check the situation on account of not knowing which way(s) you're doing it. Having it in a standardized place is going to make these problems go away over time, because the application has a central place to ask and find out about mounts. It is very similar to the networking support which allows services to only start up after a connection has been received, instead of needing the service to already be waiting for connections. Services can automatically be started when a hot-swap device is inserted, instead of some waiting service needing to know about the hardware and sit there watching it for changes. It isn't just a choice of doing it in the OS or in userspace; doing it in the OS makes possible a lot of automation that doesn't reduce performance, whereas doing that same thing in userspace is guaranteed to require a bunch of extra resources.

Re:SystemD?

[thegarbz]

Everything in the software world is moving toward micro-services

Example? If anything the entire world is moving to a more unified one solution fits all approach. Systemd is just the Linux version of what is going on everywhere else, and what is going on is that people are sick of dealing with mundane crap in their computer and believe it should be managing itself.

Re:SystemD?

[jedidiah]

That's funny because I make HEAVY use of external media on Linux and I never have problems like this.

Not really seeing the "performance" argument either.

I'm probably one of the biggest "torture testers" on here.

Re:SystemD?

[jedidiah]

Oy. That's a systemD thing? I just got bit by that the other day when I had a drive failure. It filled my my drive pretty instantly. Never saw anything like it before.

Re:SystemD?

[Aighearach]

I'm reading the comments in the linked article, and there are many good explanations of reality. The comparison here, the depth of the troll bench, it is just astounding.

Thankfully RedHat doesn't care about loud noises from the basement. They care about money, and good software costs less to support. Which is to say that those, like RedHat, who are selling support don't have to work as hard for the same money, and the customer is happier too.

As a service developer the network improvements are really great, I can't imagine turning my nose up at on-demand service activation. These mount improvements are right in that direction, too. I'd like to be able to have network filesystems that are only mounted if one of the services using them happens to be activated.

Re:SystemD?

[jedidiah]

That kind of means we have about 20 years before SystemD is ready for prime time. Instead, we have idiots trying to force a gravely pre-mature technology on everyone.

Meanwhile film technology is still very robust and quite usable.

Plus a lot of digital devices are pants even with their alleged advantages. Just because it's new shiny shiny doesn't mean it's going to be executed well.

Re:SystemD?

[jedidiah]

Except there is one very important distinction between systemD and emacs or vi.

I get to CHOOSE with those. No one tries to shove a choice down my throat. We can all be civil about are preferences and go away with no hurt feelings and even easily accommodate the other side.

There is no "peaceful coexistence" with something like SystemD. It's hostile to everything else by it's very nature. That's why it's un-Unix.

Re:SystemD?

[Aighearach]

I didn't say "I make heavy use of media big I'm a bigshot, so I need a belt AND suspenders!"

Who cares if you make heavy use? What does that tell you about what problems I have? Nothing. And it doesn't make the bugs I hit not exist, either. There are lots of mount-related bugs that have been known for years and years and don't get fixed because A) there are work-arounds and B) using traditional mount processes, they don't produce any log noise. That is a big thing with systemd; it exposes bugs by giving a shit. It is replacing a mishmash of base services that didn't give a shit. That exposes existing non-critical bugs. That is a good thing, if you care about details of your system, and value software that works.

You weren't asked to "buy" an argument. I pointed out facts, that are reasons people have. You don't have to know or be able to understand the performance difference between being able to have a rarely-used service NOT running until you need it. Who cares? Nothing is damaged by you not understanding that. And if you don't understand it, it also means you don't need to understand it, you're not managing systems where it makes a difference. No sysadmin is burning for you to understand their work needs.

It makes no difference how tortuous you find the details.

Re:SystemD?

[lucm]

What systemd does is not "manage itself". What it does is replace things that are not broken and that are well documented by a big brother service that some dude think is better. And just like wizards or frameworks or other gizmo it works ok as long as you stay in the narrow path of supported scenarios.

I've always loved the freedom of Linux but really it's heading real fast to the same philosophy as Windows and OSX (i.e the "we know what's best" approach) and it sucks.

Re:SystemD?

[SigmundFloyd]

vi is archaic and arcane.

Translation: "I'm a Vim user, therefore I'm a slouch at real Vi and have no clue about Ex".

What you should be using is....vim. ;-)

Vim is for wimps. Nvi is the real deal.

Re: SystemD?

[vandamme]

Wasn't that Kodak and not Polaroid?

Yes, and the odd thing is that Kodak engineers invented digital imaging. Then Kodak bean counters thought it would cut into their film profits.

Re:SystemD?

[dyhanan]

Travel Umroh | Paket Umroh Desember | Travel Umroh Jakarta | Paket Umroh Plus Turki

Re:SystemD?

[Nethead]

Ouch. I hate to admit that I use nano but alias it as pico.

Re:SystemD?

[Nethead]

This is why I use FreeBSD. People at work think I'm the Linux guru but I'm not. It's just close enough to BSD that I can get most things working with a bit of google-fu.

Do you want a NAT router with a DHCP server that also handles mail, DNS and FTP? Okay, give me about a half hour with a bare box. Add 5 minutes for traffic graphs delivered via MRTG and Apache. Another 10 minutes and you'll have IPv6 via a tunnel broker. All on a minimal platform using BSD.

Of course you can do that with Linux too, but I've been doing BSD for two decades now and can do it in my sleep.

I use Windows 7 as my desktop because work requires AD, AV, Checkpoint VPN, Domino Notes mail (I'm the admin.) and other programs that really just work there. But any special tasks I just request a VM, they are always surprised when I ask for just 1 CPU and 512MB of RAM. The Windows guys just don't understand how much you can get done with BSD in a small footprint.

Does not replace mount

[Anonymous Coward]

From Lennart's reddit comment:

"first of all, this doesn't replace util-linux' mount tool. Not at all. It just tells systemd to mount something, going through systemd's dependency logic. For the actual mount operation PID 1 will fork off util-linux' mount tool like it always did."

Big fucking deal.

Re:Does not replace mount

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. The only ones upset about this are the ones that did not know what it was about.

Re: Does not replace mount

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's subsumed the auto mounter. That is no better.

Re:does not replace mount

[Anonymous Coward]

Baby steps, baby steps. I'm sure the next phase will be replacing it and somehow making the old mount tools 'undesirable' in some way.

CAPTCHA: commando

Re:does not replace mount

[Darinbob]

It does seem to be replacing automount though.

Re:does not replace mount

[jrumney]

The next step will be replacing mount /dev/sdc1 /media/udisk with the new improved systemd command systemctl mount /media/udisk systemd.mount.uuid=CBB6-24F2 (arguments reversed just to be annoying, and made more complex because you should be using GUI tools for that, or just accept the default behavior you meddling fool).

Re:Does not replace mount

[93 Escort Wagon]

"like it always did."

We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Re: Does not replace mount

[DrXym]

Yes it is better as a read of the link would quickly show. It allows a user to plug in a USB stick, mount the device, mount the FS, schedule an fsck and reduce the danger if the user unplugs the stick without an explicit unmount.

Re:does not replace mount

[houghi]

.... so far. The next stap will be "Hey, we wrap it already, why not put it in there as well.

The system is started with a bootloader that treis to do everything to run an init that tries to do everything that has a GUI that tries to do everything to run a desktop that tries to do everything with in it a brower that tries to do everything to look at a website that tries to do everything.

Where is the tme that each piece of software did their seperate part and did that well. And if I wanted to change that piece, I did and it STILL worked.

Re: Does not replace mount

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

It's the camel's nose in the tent to subsume udev. What's it gonna do when you plug in a camera?

Re: Does not replace mount

[Entrope]

Sounds like system's co-dependency logic to me: It can't do anything by itself, and it won't let you do anything without it.

Re:Does not replace mount

[thegarbz]

Indeed. The only ones upset about this are the ones that did not know what it was about.

Anonymous Coward summarises 5 years of systemd debates in one line. Great work.

Re: Does not replace mount

[silentcoder]

That already happened. SystemD has been using it's own udev replacement for some time now.

Re: Does not replace mount

[jabuzz]

Don't know auto-mounter is a piece of shit when it comes to having your entries in an LDAP directory due to some moronic hard coded limit for the time the LDAP server has to respond that is too low in my opinion and at the very least not configurable.

How can you tell that I have been stung badly by this and am now bitter as a result :)

Re:Does not replace mount

[KiloByte]

We really don't want systemd to do its "dependency logic" for mounts. Case in point: have a btrfs RAID, physically remove one of its disks and mount with -o degraded. A basic operation that doesn't involve an init daemon and is impossible to get wrong, right? Not on systemd. If your RAID happens to be in fstab (ie, any real case other than when running from rescue media), systemd will helpfully instantly unmount it again. There's no known workaround for this bug other than commenting out the mount in fstab (or upgrading to sysvinit...).

I don't get how one could possibly screw this up. So systemd runs a daemon statting all your mountpoints just so it can unmount them if it believes some dependency isn't met?!?

Other cases where it messes with filesystems are not better. Where rsyslog goes to great lengths to ensure logs survive a system crash, sometimes even in annoying ways (like disk spinup on laptops) and uses append-only plain text logs that are readable even when heavily corrupted, systemd not only makes corruption and total data loss nearly guaranteed, but even goes out of its way to disable data consistency features (checksums, protection from torn writes, transactions) because "performance" and spams you with warnings if you manually turn them back.

Re: Does not replace mount

[Anne Thwacks]

Mod parent up Blah, blah, blah-di-bla. /. does not like people who are brief and to the point. Wibble, wibble, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah-di-bla. (12-bar blues style)

Re: Does not replace mount

[DrXym]

Read the link genius.

Re:does not replace mount

[DarkOx]

So what if they do? I have been pretty against systemd and I still think there is plenty to dislike about it. I use Slackware on my personal stuff to avoid. I have found it has caused far more problems than it solves at work. It seems like something that might be alright for your laptop but I don't think it makes much of any sense for my servers with long uptimes.

With all that said, there is nothing magical about mount. Its basically it self just a thin wrapper around some syscalls. Who cares? If busybox was used to mount the root filesystem in your initrd rather than gnu mount would you freak out? I don't see this one being much of an issue.

Re: Does not replace mount

[AmiMoJo]

Seems pointless wasting memory and load time on a service that just duplicates systemd functionality that is already loaded for use by other things. Also increases the available attack surface.

I get that the Unix way is to have lots of little utilities and services doing specific things, but it actually turned out to not be the best model. It's better to build a higher level, more generic system that can implement as much of this functionality in a clean, consistent way that can be carefully security hardened and tested.

The unix tools, great as they are can't even provide a consistent set of options or way to configure them, and that extends all the way up. Text files are great for configuration, until you realize they all use different formats, and rolling out a configuration change to many networked machines requires writing a special text parser or custom command.

Re:does not replace mount

[LichtSpektren]

You are here: [Embrace], extend, extinguish.

That's been a successful tactic from closed source vendors, I don't see how it can be possible with FOSS though.

Re:Does not replace mount

[jellomizer]

Most of the posts are just from people who really have no idea what systemd is for or even the old the init system. They will just use the defaults of what the distribution gave them. They are just it is different and other people say it is bad, so I will say it is bad too.
Then you have the next group who knows what it is, and for the most part just doesn't want to learn systemd as they had made their reputation with the old system. So they will grasp straws on any particular feature or tradeoff and over inflate its flaws to make it seem like it is bad.
Finally you have a small group who has a legitimate reason for not liking systemd however their particular use is rather limited in the grand scheme of usage.

Re:Does not replace mount

[Anonymous Coward]

And you have the larger group that knows that the guy that wrote system D is a no talent hack as proven by his last contribution that STILL fucks up linux left and right.

Pulse Audio is the biggest steaming pile of shit ever written, and now the fucker wants everyone to use his crap for the core of the system?

Re: Does not replace mount

[silanea]

[...] I get that the Unix way is to have lots of little utilities and services doing specific things, but it actually turned out to not be the best model. [...]

This is where most of the disagreement lies: It has not turned out to be the worse model. SystemD supporters are mostly concerned with the desktop (re. the user-does-stuff-with-thumbdrive rationale given for the mount manager). On the desktop, the SystemD approach makes a certain amount of sense. Though I have to strongly disagree on the notion that its implementation is anywhere near clean, hardened or tested, but given the timeframe and the ever-increasing scope that is to be expected and will likely improve over time - hell, all the alternatives it is trying to replace were shit when they came out. On the desktop SystemD is an improvement over the status quo, not the only possible venue, maybe not the ideal one, but it is here now and it mostly works.

But many Linux users care first and foremost about one use case, and one alone: the server. And on the server the UNIX way is the right way. The only sensible way, actually. On the server things like auto-mounting a thumbdrive so a user can diddle with it are not a thing. As are most other things SystemD is trying to do. Here SystemD is only one thing: a superfluous, possibly dangerous OS on top of the OS.

The balance between desktop and server has been turned over. I think it is great that the desktop is receiving more attention, don't get me wrong. But not at this cost.

Re:Does not replace mount

[TemporalBeing]

From Lennart's reddit comment:

"first of all, this doesn't replace util-linux' mount tool. Not at all. It just tells systemd to mount something, going through systemd's dependency logic. For the actual mount operation PID 1 will fork off util-linux' mount tool like it always did."

Big fucking deal.

Well, IMHO, it just means one more thing to go wrong. I recently had to diagnose why my agent - started via a /etc/init.d script - would not start after having been killed using "kill -9" on a systemd-based system (Deb8); running the program and daemonizing it directly worked just fine, but the init script wouldn't start it. Reason? Systemd had some state somewhere that would only get cleared if "service myservice stop" was run. Only then would the init script work.

Expect this to be similar where you'll have systemd mount something during boot, and then for some reason it gets unmounted in a way systemd didn't expect and now you can't remount it because systemd thinks its still mounted but won't tell you that.

systemd is just a piece of crap that needs to be removed.

Re: Does not replace mount

[TemporalBeing]

Seems pointless wasting memory and load time on a service that just duplicates systemd functionality that is already loaded for use by other things. Also increases the available attack surface.

I get that the Unix way is to have lots of little utilities and services doing specific things, but it actually turned out to not be the best model. It's better to build a higher level, more generic system that can implement as much of this functionality in a clean, consistent way that can be carefully security hardened and tested.

It's quite obvious that you know extremely little about security issues. When it comes to security you want things that are extremely limited in functionality - that enables security to be proven and well tested. So the Unix methodology of "do one thing and do it extremely well" is a very tried and true security method.

By contrast, one reason that malware runs so rampant on Windows is because Microsoft can't lock stuff down because of how tied together everything is. Infect IE? There goes nearly every help system in every Windows app too. Got a Windows Handle to a text box? Now you can inject code into a random app as they won't likely check the text box constraints when using the data from it. Prior to Vista there were even circular Kernel and Userspace dependencies.

So no, putting everything into one big project time and time again shows bad things happen - from poor code management because of how intertwined stuff gets and people getting lazy about linking code together to security issues since you can break one thing and crack your way into something else a whole lot easier.

systemd is the opposite of providing security in any kind of easy to lock down model.

Re:Does not replace mount

[TemporalBeing]

Most of the posts are just from people who really have no idea what systemd is for or even the old the init system.

Most posts I see are from people that know *exactly* what systemd is for, have used numerous init systems, and find a lot of issues that are extremely annoying if not system debilitating. I've run into several myself - including most recently an issue with the most basic of what systemd was suppose to do - monitoring daemons.

Re: Does not replace mount

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is better as a read of the link would quickly show. It allows a user to plug in a USB stick, mount the device, mount the FS, schedule an fsck and reduce the danger if the user unplugs the stick without an explicit unmount.

Neither you, nor the link, have described anything “better” (or for that matter, “new”). It's also pretty clear that you didn't actually read the link, or you would know that very little described in the link will actually protect anyone from pulling a flash drive out before it's been cleanly unmounted. The problem with slow flash media is (and has always been) that a considerable amount of "written" data is buffered before actually being flushed out to disk. There is nothing systemd-mount can do about that. If the flash drive is no longer plugged in, you can't flush the unwritten data to it, because it's physically not there anymore. No amount of on-access fscking is going to bring that data back. What an on-access fsck will do, is try to make sure the filesystem is at least mountable. Nothing more. It doesn't decrease the danger of an unplug without unmount at all, it tries to tidy up a bit after the real damage has already been done, and does so without letting the user know the scale of the damage. Out of sight, out of mind. A very Lennart solution.

Now, take the rubbish about unsafely unplugged USB drives/on-access fsck out of the equation for a second, and what does systemd-mount actually provide? It provides better systemd integration. Nothing described in the link is unique to systemd, not even the possibility of on-access fsck. We've gone from a system where we can fully script every aspect of the start-up process, to one where you need to write code to integrate well, and half of the smaller jobs are being undertaken by the project itself because nobody can be bothered. What a gross monster we've created.

Re: Does not replace mount

[AmiMoJo]

When it comes to security you want things that are extremely limited in functionality - that enables security to be proven and well tested. So the Unix methodology of "do one thing and do it extremely well" is a very tried and true security method.

No, my point is that the Unix method isn't that at all. It looks superficially like it is, but actually it's all these different code bases that need checking, and which can the interact in all these different and unpredictable ways, and which are difficult to use and configure because they are not consistent with each other.

Rather than building all the logic and actions for auto-mounting from scratch, yet more new code (even if it is just scripts) to worry about, it seems better to make use of the logic built into systemd. And the whole point of building it that way is to prevent it becoming intertwined.

Re: Does not replace mount

[AmiMoJo]

If your entire argument is that on servers people want to disable auto-mounting of USB devices, then a) you can with systemd and b) what does that have to do with the Unix philosophy?

Re: Does not replace mount

[Barsteward]

seeing one of udev developers was kay sievers i would say that its using its own udev, its the others like Gentoo that are making udev replacements to work with their init systems

Re:Does not replace mount

[Barsteward]

why not find out about it instead of making stupid assumptions based on your lack of knowledge of systemd?

Re:does not replace mount

[Barsteward]

its just a weak minded troll who has run out of ideas that makes the EEE claim.

Re: Does not replace mount

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure those in my department enabled and allowed auto-mounters on the servers in my organization, be it Windows or Linux, I/we would be fired. I work in Healthcare btw... I'm sure the same goes for the Financial sector...

I'm not sure who Poettering is really developing for, but from a server perspective, systemd continues its cancerous behavior..

Re: Does not replace mount

[silentcoder]

Udev is much older than that. The concept first entered Linux as DevFS which was written by Richard Gooch back in 2001. DevFS was ultimately replaced by udev and one of the primary reasons for moving that filesystem to userspace management was that, unlike a kernel driver, it would make the management system autonomous and easy to swap out with other implementations.

The whole point of udev was to NOT be tightly coupled to anything.

Re:Does not replace mount

[yithar7153]

>or upgrading to sysvinit You might be interested in runit/runsvdir (pid1/RC respectively), which is a clone of daemontools. Void uses it by default but it's also possible to install it on other systems such as Debian. Gentoo also supports it. Basically you *can* specify dependencies in the run script for a service if you want, but you don't have to. And like sysvinit, it won't unmount a filesystem automatically.

Re: Does not replace mount

[yithar7153]

From what I understand, Windows mounts removable media with sync and thus leads to very bad performance. I think the best solution in any case is to have people type sudo sync before removing the USB drive as a habit.

Removable drives are, by default, mounted as sync=true, so that very little buffering is done while writing to it, and the OS tries very hard to guarantee that if you pull it out immediately after a write() call has finished, you won't lose any data.

Re: Does not replace mount

[silanea]

No. My argument is that on the server, many of systemd's components are either solutions in search of a problem or trying to solve real problems the wrong way. It started with things like accepting log corruption in return for faster performance. On most desktops, that is a justifiable trade-off. On a server, it is a minority use case. With a really tiny minority on whose servers I for one would not be willing to rely.

As I said: systemd is acceptable for desktops or other user-facing systems. Things that you expect to break anyhow because of user dumbness, hardware failure or spilled coffee, where reinstallation or replacement is cheaper and more practical than investing in reliability. There it brings you net benefits due to its design trade-offs. On a server I want to be able to retrace why something failed, not just have the system go back to some mostly functional default state or take a guess at what might be the best way to proceed. On a server I need to trust the system to do exactly what it is supposed to do, and to do it not just once or twice but every single time.

I know that it has become a bit of a trend to treat servers like just another machine and simply redeploy instead of fixing issues. For many business cases this may be the more economic solution. It is not the one I consider sensible and future-proof.

Re: Does not replace mount

[paulpach]

I get that the Unix way is to have lots of little utilities and services doing specific things

But this is exactly what Systemd is. Systemd is a collection of several dozens of binaries each one doing specific things. People say systemd is monolithic and bloated because it packages all these binaries together. But that is exactly how other popular packages like util-linux and binutils are packaged, and nobody bats an eye about them.

Heck by any definition of monolithic, the linux kernel is a lot more monolithic than systemd. Where is the outrage?. There is an occasional microkernel vs monolithic kernel discussion, but its nothing compared to the Systemd flamewars.

I know this is slashdot and it is customary to hate SystemD, but does anyone actually have a technical argument against it? All the systemd tools I have tried seems to work well. Even if they didn't, they are all separate binaries and it is trivial to replace each individual component. It seems to be adopted by a lot of distributions by the developers choice. Has anyone here had an actual problem with systemd? if so, were you unable to replace the specific tool from systemd that did not work for you?

Re: Does not replace mount

[silanea]

There is actually a second aspect that I missed: I know, systemd is more or less modular, not one monolithic binary etc. Still from what I have seen in recent distros, if you get systemd, you get the whole shebang in one go. On a server the common philosophy is not to have anything that you do not explicitely want on it. Whether this auto-mount and some other desktop-oriented systemd features are trivial to disable is beside the point: On a server they should not even be there without someone actively installing them. This is not really systemd's fault but the distros', since they should package it according to system scope or role; still I have seen this change in mindset coincide with the introduction of systemd. There does seem to be a systemic 'corruption' of the ecosystem going on where we all unlearn the lessons of the past.

Re: Does not replace mount

[ookaze]

This is where most of the disagreement lies: It has not turned out to be the worse model. SystemD supporters are mostly concerned with the desktop (re. the user-does-stuff-with-thumbdrive rationale given for the mount manager). On the desktop, the SystemD approach makes a certain amount of sense.

That's a false statements at several levels. The first false statement is saying "systemd supporters", framing it as a political choice. Actually, "systemd supporters" are "systemd users" that know what they are talking about practically not just in theory, and most of the time the opposite camps are people that don't know of what they are talking about. Most of them are completely computer illiterate, or at least don't understand anything about system administration, and they're instantly spotted. The second false statement is saying that "systemd users" are mostly concerned with the desktop. That's plain nonsense, and even someone who is computer illiterate understands that Linux distributions like Debian and RHEL are not mostly concerned with the desktop and still switched to systemd, and are not going back any time soon.
The systemd approach is very simple : always tell the admin when sth is going wrong. Most sysadmins have a staggeringly low technical level, I discovered this years ago.
They didn't have to care before, because their broken setups where working most of the time by chance, but spectacularly broke at times. And these people were unable to even understand why their setup was wrong, because with sysvinit and all kind of broken helpers, problems where put under the rug and nobody was aware of anything going wrong unless they went deep looking in the logs. systemd shows them their setup was broken, and doesn't silently ignore errors like sysvinit and shell scripts did. That's why all these people are mad at systemd which shows their bad skills (that they advertise on forums, being so illiterate) and claim that servers don't need systemd, because, you know, hardware or network never breaks on their servers.
Every competent sysadmin (and distro ones are among them) has had to fight an impossible battle to make things work most of the time with sysvinit, not a single one of them will claim that all was working with sysvinit. I sure don't, even though I customized lots of servers, like the ones that say all was working well, and then contradicting themselves by saying they can't modify init scripts anymore.

But many Linux users care first and foremost about one use case, and one alone: the server. And on the server the UNIX way is the right way. The only sensible way, actually. On the server things like auto-mounting a thumbdrive so a user can diddle with it are not a thing. As are most other things SystemD is trying to do. Here SystemD is only one thing: a superfluous, possibly dangerous OS on top of the OS.

This is a perfect illustration of what I said: philosophical debate to counter technical things. What is the "UNIX way"? There's no clear technical definition.
Anyway, we don't care on Linux, as Linux is not UNIX, and never worked the UNIX way.
Anyway, you don't even have to use this mount utility, and the most important thing is that whining about it won't change anything anyway.
And systemd is not an OS, but that's the kind of things computer illiterate people do.

Re:Does not replace mount

[ookaze]

We really don't want systemd to do its "dependency logic" for mounts. Case in point: have a btrfs RAID, physically remove one of its disks and mount with -o degraded. A basic operation that doesn't involve an init daemon and is impossible to get wrong, right? Not on systemd. If your RAID happens to be in fstab (ie, any real case other than when running from rescue media), systemd will helpfully instantly unmount it again. There's no known workaround for this bug other than commenting out the mount in fstab (or upgrading to sysvinit...).

If you insist on calling this a bug, unfortunately for you, that means it is a kernel bug, and more specifically a btrfs bug. And there are three workarounds :
- managing the mount manually, which is the most sensible thing to do as all your braindead operation was manual anyway;
- fixing btrfs so that it reports degraded fs as degraded, and not as dead;
- making a user space daemon that manages btrfs, like for LVM;
The most stupid thing to do is to shoot the messenger systemd, and of course, that's what most system illiterate people like you do.
And they advertise their lack of knowledge on forums to really show people how stupid they are, instead of educating themselves.

I don't get how one could possibly screw this up. So systemd runs a daemon statting all your mountpoints just so it can unmount them if it believes some dependency isn't met?!?

Like most systemd opponents, you don't know what you're talking about and it's instantly showing.

Where rsyslog goes to great lengths to ensure logs survive a system crash, sometimes even in annoying ways (like disk spinup on laptops) and uses append-only plain text logs that are readable even when heavily corrupted, systemd not only makes corruption and total data loss nearly guaranteed, but even goes out of its way to disable data consistency features (checksums, protection from torn writes, transactions) because "performance" and spams you with warnings if you manually turn them back.

It shows that you're not understanding *anything* technical, when the link you gave contradicts what you said in the same sentence. The systemd journal is doing append-only plain text logs that are readable even when heavily corrupted. One difference with other logging tools, is that systemd actually informs you when your logs are corrupted. If you even understand logs and know their history, they were always designed to not advertedly affect the OS, so that performance was always the primary goal before reliability, thus why syslogd with UDP and the like. The log system should not put your system to a halt like it did on btrfs because btrfs, well, is just not production ready yet. They actually did that because a systemd user did a bug report. A true sysadmin with a true problem, not an ignorant whiner on a forum with no understanding of Linux.

Re: Does not replace mount

[silanea]

Firstly: I deliberately said supporters, not users.They are not the same thing. It very much is a choice, whether you want to call it political, that is up to you. I am a systemd user, I have it on my Fedora laptop, two Ubuntu servers and soon on one or two desktops, probably also Fedora or maybe Mint. That I use it does not make me a supporter or proponent. I use it for certain purposes. For other purposes on other machines, I do not use it and never would. Do not mix those two up. Most people who use UNIXoid systems professionally also have to use Windows machines at some point. That does not make them Microsoft supporters. Having a Dell monitor does not make me a Dell supporter.

Secondly: Your grand-standing about computer literacy is not exactly a sound counter-argument to what I wrote. Most system admins are incompetent (not as a judgement but literally lacking the technical competence to properly manage all aspects of running systems), I agree. To some extent I belong to them, I luckily do not run servers for a living, I can rely on others to do that for me. But people like me are not the benchmark here. People worth listening to do not complain about systemd in the belief that stuff never breaks. Quite to the contrary! Assuming breakage is the baseline from which you work up everything else. The issue I have with systemd is that it treats breakage as normal, working around it and trying to apply band-aids automagically. There are use cases for that, ie. the desktop (in most cases) and a certain portion of the server user base. But on my servers I do not want the system to route around damage unless I specifically set up fail safe mechanisms and fall backs myself. I want my machines to fail. So I know where trouble is brewing. And from my experience systemd has made it harder for me to debug issues. It is an opaque layer between me and the basic system functionality, and punching through has been more trouble and work than it should be. I like to compare it to NetworkManager: When that was introduced, it sucked. By now I love it on the desktop. On the server it is the first thing I purge from the system, because it has consistently caused problems and made things a lot more complex to set up and debug.

Thirdly: Do not confuse resistance to systemd with resistance to change. sysvinit has been showing its age for a long time. As have X11 and a few other parts of the ecosystem. I am happy to leave init scripts behind for a more sensible mechanism. But systemd is not the only kid in town. There are other initiatives to solve the issues we face, and most of them have taken a much less radical approach and far smaller scope. This is the way for me on the server side. This does not diminish the benefits some use cases draw from systemd right here and now. But it is not the holy grail some of its proponents make it out to be.

Wrapper, not replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a new wrapper around the existing mount tool. Systemd is changing how it mounts things to standardize that portion of jobs, and it's also handling auto-mounting of external media, like your desktop environment probably already does. has done for ages.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Sarten-X]

Yep. That won't stop the hivemind from shouting against it, though. According to Slashdotters, everything must be done as it's always been done, regardless of any externalities.

Meanwhile, I have a server (based on an ugly inherited design) that has to figure out its remote filesystems based on the network structure, as determined by a user-run script. The process I inherited was to boot the server, run the script, then mount the filesystems it reported needing. Then and only then could the main daemon be started manually.

Fuck that.

An upcoming rework will automate the process with scripts, but it seems like the sort of thing that falls right in systemd's wheelhouse. Systemd's goal is to start the system services, which would reasonably include my daemon. It therefore also seems reasonable that systemd could have access to mounting functions, to ensure the system is ready to start that daemon.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[ultranova]

According to Slashdotters, everything must be done as it's always been done, regardless of any externalities.

Which is kinda ironic for a forum once centered around new technology. We've gotten old :(.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[PPH]

Just a wrapper around mount. I don't have a problem with that. What does bother me is that Lennart and company have only figured out this late in the init game that mounting is something that we need done. Great. Go for it. You've still got a dozen or so other things that need to be handled (which scripts have been doing for ages). We will sit back in amusement and watch as you find yet another function that you've forgotten about. And rush to build yet another wheel or lever into your Rube Goldberg contraption.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[sjames]

I'm not seeing a lot of shouting.

Meanwhile, since you'll have to re-do the startup on that server anyway, why not just have that script go ahead and mount the filesystem it says it needs and then run the main daemon? That way it will run anywhere. Then just call that from an init script.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Sarten-X]

There are already the usual anti-systemd flames and complaints about how it's absorbing ever more functionality.

As for the server itself, that is roughly the current plan. The devil's in the details, though, when it comes to handling errors in detecting the network configuration and mounting the remote filesystems. For example, as node A initializes, it should try to connect to (and mount) nodes B, C, and D, but if a node is down, the other node connections should function normally until the missing node returns, at which time that connection should be established and the data synchronized among the nodes.

Writing standard scripts to handle the process isn't an intractable problem, but it'd be much simpler with a more robust environment. I'm curious (and a bit hopeful) to see whether systemd can provide the necessary functionality without extensive custom scripting.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Lost Race]

New operating systems are great. Lennart and his friends should go ahead and write one.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[sjames]

Sure, because the many issues have not been resolved. But there is little talk of the mount wrapper since for once, it's the right approach.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[lgw]

Systemd objections are not about "any change is bad". They're about "this change is bad".

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Antique Geekmeister]

> An upcoming rework will automate the process with scripts,

Or someone could have learned to use "autofs" effectively.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[silentcoder]

Yes... and ought to. It's a job that absolutely belongs in a desktop environment and absolutely does NOT belong any lower in the stack than that - because there is no universally 'correct' way to deal with removable media - the common pattern is ONLY correct in a D.E. - lower in the stack any number of options could be correct for the use-case up to and including completely preventing the mounting of any removable media for security reasons.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[silentcoder]

Indeed. We didn't mind simpleinit, or upstart or openRC or slackware's BSD-init - all of these were different init systems in the past. We didn't mount autofs or any of a dozen mount helpers added on top of the unix basic during the years.

To suggest that the opposition to SystemD is generically opposing change is to ignore that the people opposing it have been embracing change in all the areas where it plays for decades and are STILL embracing change in those areas - we're just not embracing THIS change because we believe it's badly designed. Having this many basic tools in a common code-base with massive interdependency that makes it near impossible to swap tools out with other tools or run any of them without running all of them... THAT Is a terrible design.

Hell, we don't even do that on the desktop where it may almost make sense. For over a decade KDE has had performance improvements if you run KDE apps in a KDE desktop - but never, once, did we have a KDE app you couldn't run under Gnome or OpenBox or any other DE you want. The coupling was always weak - use the features when available, don't depend on them. And vice versa - all the apps ran under all the desktops. You didn't struggle to run gimp or libreOffice if you chose KDE as your desktop - despite neither of them being written for it. In fact, there were patches you could install to integrate them better which were entirely optional.

That's a good design.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Sique]

I've to see yet a valid objection about this change. All I see is "but my custom init scripts don't work anymore" and "init was it, init is it, and init will it be in all eternity".

init is a good solution in a constant environment, where you know beforehand what hardware is present, and where changes are seldom and will happen during scheduled downtimes. This is ok for most server environments and for cloud services. It is not workable for desktops and laptops, where hardware change on the fly is the norm with USB devices being plugged in and out, the network connectivity changing between different WiFi networks, LTE and ethernet, Bluetooth and different power saving modes which switch on and off different parts of the hardware.

Yes, you can try to play whack-a-mole and add custom init scripts for all the additional hardware and network configurations so they change on the fly, but it gets complex very soon, and it is error-prone, and you have long left the original runlevel concept that init used to define different states of the machine, because you would need hundreds of thousands of different runlevels given the possible number of combinations.

So if runlevels aren't the solution anymore, why keep the concept of init scripts, whose task it was to describe the differences between runlevels?

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[silentcoder]

You know it's weird, but there is literally not a single thing on your list that Linux hasn't been used for successfully and doing successfully for the better part of 20 years. None of these are new problems. So since systemD is only 6 years old and most major distro's didn't adopt it until the last 3, I guess all of us were just suffering some mass delusion when we watched all this stuff working beautifully back in 2000 when nobody had ever concevied of systemD - and progressively get better every year since.

Now nobody is saying that there cannot be better solutions for this - what I can tell you is that a better solution CANNOT come from a massive bunch of tightly coupled tools with opague interfaces that are so utterly cross dependent that none of them can run (at least without massive hacks) unless you also run all the others.

The ONLY way to EVER do a good solution - especially at the system level - is to build it out of lots of LOOSELY coupled tiny bits that don't care how you put them together or what you put them together with (including pieces that the creators never knew existed).
That design has allowed an OS first compiled in 1969 to scale to the largest supercomputers and the smallest embedded devices alike, to survive 50 years of computing history jumping from platform to platform and architecture to architecture, resilient across one major revolution after the other - because it could adapt to any need and any use-case. Because you never had to redesign it to meet a new challenge, you just had to add a few small tools to the mix, and put the others together in a new way.

The lego-blocks approach is the heart and soul of the unix philosophy - and it's a philosophy worth preserving because that philosophy is literally the ONLY thing that has caused Unix to be the single longest-living architecture in computer history. It's an architecture that's so easy to evolve that no revolution was out of it's reach. From mainframes to PC's to phones - it went where the hardware went and was consistently the most reliable and cheapest and fit-for-purpose answer because it was designed to be easy to rebuild by simply taking the blocks and hooking them up in a new way that Kernighan and Ritchie never imagined.

In other words - everything SystemD is not.

We love doing things in new ways, we love change - but we're GOOD at spotting the difference between progress and regression - and systemd is NOT progress, systemD is doing on Linux the exact same mistakes that every operating system besides unix in history has made. If it remains dominant too long - the outcome will be that Linux goes the way of Multics or VMS because, like those, it will not be able to survive the next revolution.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Entrope]

Do you even Linux, bro? It was handling hot-swap just fine before systemd came along. You didn't even show that you knew about how distros handled it (without needing arbitrary init scripts or the like) before, and your comment about runlevels suggests that you fundamentally misunderstand them.

The only thing you mentioned that could be improved is handling network changes -- but that's something that applications have to do, based on their own patterns of network usage and how they can recover from a change in transport. systemd can't fix that.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Eunuchswear]

We've gotten old

In my experience most of the anti-systemd people are not "old". They like to claim titles like "greybeard" and "veteran" but many of them are only in their 30's.

I'm 57, systemd doesn't exactly seem a shocking new thing to me. I've been used to rapid change for all my life. Getting my head around paged virtual memory back in the '70s, or graphical workstations in the '80s, now that was interesting, since then...

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Eunuchswear]

Since mount(1) is just a wrapper around mount(2) what's your problem?

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Bearhouse]

Well, I've gotten older...still welcome progress though.
Progress as in positive change. Not bullshit change for change's sake.
Seen from a neutral standpoint (as a BSD neckbeard I've no dog in this fight) I maybe see the point of Systemd for non-tech "desktop" users.
But for servers?

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Barsteward]

there are only a set number of hours in the day. they can't design/write/test everything at once.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Barsteward]

you'd better buy a tin foil hat

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[perp]

Maybe *you* didn't mind upstart, but I am fully in agreement with whoever called it a "lightly documented pachinko machine".

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[gaudior]

Apparently, they already have.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[fahrbot-bot]

we're just not embracing THIS change because we believe it's badly designed. Having this many basic tools in a common code-base with massive interdependency that makes it near impossible to swap tools out with other tools or run any of them without running all of them... THAT Is a terrible design.

But really good job security for Lennart and his crew over there at Red Hat and that employer's position in the Linux food chain.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[GlennC]

You do realize that Linux is also run on servers, right?

Also, many of those servers don't have desktop environments and don't generally have random USB drives attached to them.

SystemD may or may not be suitable for the average laptop/desktop system. It is entirely unsuitable for servers, and I don't see how server operators can allow using it while maintaining relevant privacy and security certifications, particularly in the Medical and Financial sectors.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[Sarten-X]

Maybe that's the problem... The demographic is old enough to fit the "cranky old man" role, but not enough to be the "wise old man".

There's a point where things change just as soon as you get it figured out, and that's a jarring and uncomfortable time. There's also a point where that's happened too many times already, and you just don't care any more.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[silentcoder]

I wasn't debating the relative merits of the different systems. I WAS stating that there was no outcry against their existence or the fact that they got included in major distros. Nobody got angry about their presence.

So why are we angry about SystemD ? Because that anger has nothing whatsoever to do with the init tool that comes with SystemD. It's anger at having other tools tightly coupled to that init tool. Tight coupling is ALWAYS a terrible design. There is no such thing as a GOOD reason to tightly couple things. We didn't resist change - we occasionally chose one tool over another because we preferred some changes more than others. SystemD has actively undermined our ability to do that - which is what we are resisting.
You call us resistant to change ? On the contrary -we're resisting stagnation, we're resisting letting anybody get in the WAY of changing whatever we want.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[silentcoder]

Sounds about right yeah :(

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[PPH]

they can't design/write/test everything at once.

That's why *NIX environments are made up of a bunch of smaller components that do one thing each. And why systemd is garbage. Just try designing, writing and testing that one single object with such a large number of inputs, outputs and configuration options. And make sure that one setting doesn't break something else that logically should be unrelated. Pretty soon you've just got Windows.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[PPH]

They're about "this change is bad".

Not even so much this change is bad. But why does everything have to be fixed by cramming it into one component?

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[PPH]

I'm curious (and a bit hopeful) to see whether systemd can provide the necessary functionality without extensive custom scripting.

For systemd to properly handle all of the possible use cases and oddball installations that current init systems handle now, it will essentially become another shell with it's own interpreted language. And after all the screaming and yelling is done, we'll be right back where we started. Except with one more screw-ball language.

Re:Wrapper, not replacement

[jwhitener]

I'm curious (and a bit hopeful) to see whether systemd can provide the necessary functionality without extensive custom scripting.

That is what I'm mostly curious about as well. If systemd just makes me re-write all my scripts, but their verbosity doesn't diminish, I'm not sure what I've gained.

Like you, I've got systems with network mounts, database and ldap dependencies, etc.. scripts can help automate a lot of it, but it isn't perfect. I hope systemd can make multi-dependency shutdown/startups easier, and it doesn't turn out to just be a different way of doing things that ends up just as complex.

I've read next to nothing about systemd yet, the answer might already exist.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Noryungi]

yadda yadda yadda.

Linux does not "force" you into anything: systemd is still optional and many linux distros run perfectly well without systemd (including my old friend Slackware).

And if you really don't like Linux, there is always the BSD. Nope, no systemd there, no sirree.

So anyway... yeah, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[mark-t]

There are systemd-free distros of Linux, you know. I can pretty confidently state that it will remain that way unless systemd should start to integrate itself into the kernel.

Devuan is a Debian distrro not shipping system d

[chris2net23]

Devuan is a Debian distrro not shipping system d. I only know about it because it's supported by the EOMA68 project which aims to manufacture computers based around a modular computing standard that is free software friendly. Unlike Intel/AMD: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at Phoronix forum. Does not anyone recognise "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Re:Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

[gweihir]

The part of the Linuxers cheering on systemd come from Windows. They think this is the way things are supposed to be done...

When the only tool you have is a hammer...

[QuietLagoon]

Lennart argued it will greatly improve the handling of removable media like USB sticks.

... everything starts looking like a nail.

Re:When the only tool you have is a hammer...

[fahrbot-bot]

Lennart argued it will greatly improve the handling of removable media like USB sticks.

... everything starts looking like a nail.

When you hear hoof-beats, you think systemd, not zebras - wait... "horses". Whatever. It's *something* people will still want to beat after it's dead. Maybe I'm thinking about Lennart...

Re:When the only tool you have is a hammer...

[jrumney]

... everything starts looking like a thumb.

FTFY.

Re:When the only tool you have is a hammer...

[thegarbz]

When the only tool you have is a hammer, make a new one appropriate for the job, like say... a wrapper for the standard mount tool.

But yes I'm sure the traditional way of manually going through and handling failed started services or writing incredibly convoluted init scripts is far better. But hey when the only tool you have is a bash script, everything starts looking scriptable.

Re:When the only tool you have is a hammer...

[LichtSpektren]

"very major distribution without any real alternative"

You could use Slackware, Devuan, Gentoo, or you could configure Debian to go back to sysvinit (which is still supported, just not the default). There's lots of alternatives. Stop crying victim.

When everything you do

[RightwingNutjob]

invited complaints, counter-arguments, and forks to get away from your shit, maybe you should take that as a hint to just stop. Chances are that you are, in fact, not the only sane man left.

Re:When everything you do

[mark-t]

To play devil's advocate, consider that heliocentrism was pretty widely ridiculed (to put it mildly) when it was first proposed, and it took centuries before it was eventually accepted as fact.

Re:When everything you do

[ljw1004]

invited complaints, counter-arguments, and forks to get away from your shit, maybe you should take that as a hint to just stop. Chances are that you are, in fact, not the only sane man left.

I honestly can't tell whether you're saying Poettering should stop (since systemd generates so many complaints), or the naysayers should stop (since systemd is so widely adopted and the naysayers aren't the "only sane ones left").

Re:When everything you do

[johannesg]

So why are so many distros using it? Maybe you should just take that as a hint to take it more seriously?

What is the actual problem of using systemd as a mount tool? I've read the entire thread and not seen a single complaint other than the fact that it is "systemd by leonart poetering", which to me seems like an extremely childish case of shooting the messenger.

Re:When everything you do

[jez9999]

Presumably because it violates the sacred Unix doctrine of "a program should do one thing, and do it well". Personally I've thought that doctrine has been out of date for some time now, having set up and configured one or two Linux e-mail servers (I just want a fucking MS Exchange equivalent where I can install one thing and have SMTP, POP3, IMAP, Webmail, etc.)

Re:When everything you do

[thegarbz]

When everything you do invites complaints, just accept the fact that most people talk out of their arse without understanding anything.

Ignore them and don't let idiots get in the way of what you're doing. Like the idiots complaining about the fact that systemd just added the ability to call the standard mount program, nothing more, yet the entire world just had a collective orgasm while typing hate messages about things they have no idea about.

Re:When everything you do

[swb]

My take is the "do one thing" doctrine worked for Unix in an older era of CLI interfaces and generally less complex environments. In the more modern era, we've gotten into more complex systems where "one thing" really is many different things but we expect them to mostly integrate and act like one thing rather than actually being different things from different vendors that require a lot of user glue to get them to work together in addition to some developer awareness.

In your mail system example, we kind of expect a mail system to be one thing -- MTA, local delivery, web client, directory interface, and one more client interface protocols, all well integrated and functionally aware of the other.

Ironically, since 2007, Exchange has grown more modular (CAS, Mailbox Server, Hub Transport) but has the benefit of being a single source system which has all the parts depending on how you structure your environment. They also have the maze of services that handle this job with no obvious service-level delineation in many cases among server roles. But most people just install all the roles on one system.

IMHO, the desktop environment is another place where the "one thing" mantra kind of falls apart.

Re:When everything you do

[Entrope]

Having robust, testable, easily isolated components is even more important when you have a complex system -- and the way you get those is by defining the one thing that each component should do, and making it do that thing well.

Have you ever tried to debug something that has both complex components and complex interactions, either between the components or with external entities (people or machines)? Very frequently, if the designer decomposed it well, the nature of the failure will make it pretty obvious which part is failing. systemd fails in that department; just look at a few of the thousands of bug reports against it.

Re:When everything you do

[Erik Hensema]

In fact, I don't feel systemd generates many complaints. Surely it does generate complaints. By many? I think we're dealing with a very vocal minoroty here. And of course bugs, like any orther package. Around me (I'm a professional Linux sysadmin) I hear everybody to be very happy with systemd in general. It solves so many problems in such a nice way.

I however do understand the complaints. Traditionally a sysadmin keeps his systems stable. Change is never good in the eyes of the sysadmin. Change always is the enemy of stability.

However in a modern world of ever faster change, such sysadmins are growing obsolete, fast. And they're getting increasingly frustrated with the world around them, which they understand less and less. I don't care how your systems worked a decade ago. I want to work how your systems will work next month. Please don't live in the past.

Wayland suffers from the same category of nay-sayers. Please, install Slackware and be content with your obsolesence. And don't come shouting at the people and software you don't understand any more.

Re:When everything you do

[LichtSpektren]

Most Linux users are at worst begrudgingly accepting systemd as evidenced by the lack of max exodus to said forks. When the widespread opinion doesn't reflect real world usage, maybe you should consider the possibility that you live in an echo-chamber.

What "mass exodus"? Can you back that up with some facts?

Re:When everything you do

[Junta]

The thing is it works well, until something cocks up, then it's utter hell. The non-deterministic boot process is killer. I have had a hell of a time diagnosing systems where people have done things so root filesystem will not mount on normal boot. Then I try to boot single and it works fine, or rdshell. It turns out to be some crazy ass race condition between two things *no one* realized would be related, or should be related.

Also, things that were straightforward get strangely complicated. SysV init didn't care one bit about something like docker, but a lot of work and complication went on to coordinate systemd and docker.

I have more admins than ever requiring support and I can't fault them for being unable to contend with the mess they have been saddled with. It's more featureful, but it takes things too far making a lot of things impossible to reasonably debug. I personally would love to see journald eschew the binary-only logging and for systemd to offer a deterministic boot mode, where boot speed is compromised for the sake of repeatability.

It's not just old folks whining about change,, there are very concrete things that are being done incorrectly. Sure there are more nebuluous rants that may be either folks trying to get a rise out of the community or have a difficult time expressing their general frustration in a more concrete ways, but that's no reason to sweep the real problems under the rug along with them.

Re:When everything you do

[jez9999]

You're certainly right about Exchange being an example of a program that neither does only one thing, nor does it well.

That must be why loads of businesses are willing to pay lots of money to keep using it, to point of strong vendor lock-in.

Re:When everything you do

[swb]

That's great when the larger system was designed by a single entity and the atomic components were designed to be part of a very well defined standard and system.

But taking email as an example, there's this design architecture of MTA, MUA, local delivery but on many Unix systems you have a whole bunch of parts that were designed against this general architecture but were really designed to work specifically with each other. POP/IMAP daemons, MTAs, local delivery agents (some of which do filtering, some of which don't), the whole concept of directory lookup, web mail (which brings a ton of other baggage to the table).

It doesn't feel like a system comprised of components designed to do one thing, it feels fragmented, with different components requiring unique configurations to match which bit you have installed for a specific role.

Re:When everything you do

[KermodeBear]

That's the thing.

I see a lot of criticism thrown towards systemd, and it does violate the "single responsibility done well" philosophy. I've also seen criticisms of the bugs, how it isn't ready for production systems, how troubleshooting is very difficult, how the maintainers are not receptive to suggestions/bugs/fixes, etc., etc. I think these are very valid concerns.

And yet, many distributions are moving to it.

Unless there is some kind of Super Secret Linux Conspiracy, you know, like some kind of George Soros of the Linux world, then the only other explanation is that systemd is offering some kind of improved utility that the initd system lacks.

We're not the kind of people that would replace such a critical piece of core functionality on a whim. If it is broken the entire system is going to be in a very sorry state.

So what does systemd offer that is worth that kind of risk?

Re:When everything you do

[Barsteward]

nicely put.

Re:When everything you do

[Barsteward]

why don't you log in and make the same claim? then we can ridicule you if you are wrong but i guess you are an Anonymous coward for a reason

Re:When everything you do

[Barsteward]

bollox...... provide a link for proof of your claim

Re:When everything you do

[mark-t]

I am comparing the *reception* of systemd it to how heliocentrism was once received, not suggesting that systemd is actually better in the same way that heliocentrism was actually better than geocentrism. My point is that merely being poorly received is not an indicator of whether something is actually better.

Re:When everything you do

[slack_justyb]

Define component then.

Scripts might have not been a single monolith, but they sure functionally acted as one. Most admins tossed crap in rc.local because touching the actual init scripts was playing with black magic.

You can make write a single object file to do one thing and do it well. You can then take several other one thing done well object files and compile them into a library of really useful stuff. Does this act of compiling them all into a single thing suddenly break the one thing done well ethos of the objects within? So this whole thing of one thing done well, is just people cutting arbitrary lines in sand.

systemd fails in that department; just look at a few of the thousands of bug reports against it.

That's a ridiculous metric. The project is a very large one and projects of similar size have large amounts of bug reports as well.

Very frequently, if the designer decomposed it well, the nature of the failure will make it pretty obvious which part is failing.

Which is why we dumped scripts, trying to make heads of tails of where a change went wrong took an inordinate amount of time of swimming through script after script to see where the one thing that was supposed to be done, didn't happen. The very arguments that you've used against systemd are the exact same ones leveled against the very thing that everyone seems so damn certain to want to go back to. I'm just fully convinced at this point that haters going to hate and that's all there is to it.

Re:When everything you do

[Entrope]

I was using the common CS definition of component. The lines are not arbitrary at all.

Your misinterpretation of what I said is the ridiculous thing here. The number of bugs reported doesn't indicate why it's a failure of software design -- the nature of those bugs do. But you'd have to do what I said, and look at several of them to follow the finger-pointing and confusion about root causes, to know what I meant.

The fact that systemd has now centralized and complicated a fragile arrangement does not make it an improvement.

Re:When everything you do

[Entrope]

Yeah, I get that you don't like email, but basically the entire stack of brokenness that you are complaining of there derives from the fact that mbox is a terrible format for storing email with concurrent read/write access. It's almost impossible to design a good software stack on top of a fundamentally mistaken architecture.

Re:When everything you do

[swb]

the fact that mbox is a terrible format for storing email with concurrent read/write access

And that's the weakness of an uncoordinated do one thing model. You're stuck with the common denominator of the uncoordinated legacy component of the system.

If you want to database the email, you break everything but MTAs. You need delivery agents and access daemons and clients that work with the database format.

Re:When everything you do

[suutar]

since he said "lack of mass exodus", you seem to be agreeing.

Re:When everything you do

[Entrope]

No, that's the weakness of optimizing your data store for simplicity and then sticking with the choice for decades after people identify scalability problems. The format you choose for storing email is not a "component".

Also, databasing email doesn't break "everything but MTAs". Commonly used MUAs use IMAP or something web-oriented to talk to the mail store, so they never know about the change. You're asking for an MDA change, so of course the MDA will change -- but not break.

Re:When everything you do

[N!k0N]

And yet, many distributions are moving to it.

Unless there is some kind of Super Secret Linux Conspiracy[...]

I think that rather than "conspiracy", a lot of the distros starting to use it can be attributed to systemd making themselves a dependency of so much, coupled to the general problems of getting a distro out the door, and you simply ended up with the devs going "fuck it, I'm tired of tearing out all this crap". In addition, since it's simply easier to take from upstream (and add your "flavor" on top), it ends up simply being a cascade -- oh, Debian stable is systemd, so now Ubuntu 16.04 is, and in turn Mint 18 is (and whatever other distros that're downstream of Debian Stable or Ubuntu)

So, you end up with the only way to get away from it is either something completely different (e.g. Slackware), or a fork (e.g. Devuan), and then, if you so choose, further forking and re-building the things that systemd has hooked itself into (or forgoing those things in favor of something else). And well, that takes a lot of effort, and not everyone is inclined to provide the effort, or has the means to help even if they want to; not to mention the inability (for reasons outside their control) to wait for these things to be "fixed".

Godwinned in just 17 minutes.

[mark-t]

Not a record... but still pretty impressive.

Re:Godwinned in just 17 minutes.

[Barsteward]

they don't have the intelligence to do that....

Re:Godwinned in just 17 minutes.

[Austerity Empowers]

A concerned German

And card carrying member of the National Socialist German Grammar Party

Re: Godwinned in just 17 minutes.

[keith_nt4]

Does "Goodwin's law" really have to be a verb? And shouldn't it be Goodwin'd anyway?

Re:Godwinned in just 17 minutes.

[Platinumrat]

Don't be ridiculous. The holocaust never happened, SystemD certainly is happening.

Don't worry. Systemd will take over the functions of a version control system, GIT/SVN/SCCS/... and all records of it happening will be erased.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Etcetera]

There are systemd-free distros of Linux, you know. I can pretty confidently state that it will remain that way unless systemd should start to integrate itself into the kernel.

Well, yes... Most importantly RHEL6 / CentOS6. Those of us using Linux in business/enterprise settings are mostly running that, and that's mostly what we care about. The time limit on that is what we're sweating.

RedHat (Inc.) seems to be undervaluing its Good Will in terms of building an enterprise platform that goes well beyond RHEL subscriptions. EL users don't care about most of the systemd "feature" set (with the possible exception of easy(-ier) cgroup management), since most of the rest either doesn't apply or attempts to re-solve and already mostly-solved problem (eg, service monitoring and restart scripts). The cost is using less mature, less modular, less tested code with more common failure points, which might cover 80% of your needs but makes the other 20% of system customization really, really difficult, because apparently shell scripting is a Sin now.

Oh, and most of your config management that worked pretty similarly between EL5 and EL6 has a *lot* more of a delta to work with EL7.

"Forking Fedora" doesn't seem like it will happen, even though there are fewer and fewer non Kool-Aid drinkers there who think keeping your options open is a good thing.

Do you know what I'd like for EL8? Fork EL6, update all the non-daemon RPM versions to their current Fedora level, and run systemd as Just Another Daemon, akin to xinetd, supervise, or your cluster management software.

We get more reliable and more deterministic startup and shutdown process using the previous initscripts toolset and regular /sbin/init, and those who want the management capabilities of systemd for services can still use it, albeit with it not functioning as PID 1. I'd pay for that.

Linux

[Vlijmen Fileer]

Next month: Systemd rolls out its own Linux

Re:Linux

[Vlijmen Fileer]

"Canonical"?
Isn't that that sect that makes Babylinux^DUbuntu?
If you're using that you have a whole different sort of issue to solve first.

Re:Linux

[LichtSpektren]

Mint doesn't have any automatic updates to my knowledge.

Lennart P., if you're reading this?

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: DO NOT STOP - you're winning man... the shellscript kiddies are scared shitless & worried about their TENUOUS "job security" since you largely eliminate their homemade custom scripts via your tech!

APK

P.S.=> DO NOT STOP... apk

Re:Lennart P., if you're reading this?

[Anonymous Coward]

While you are at it Lennart, pull the hosts file functions into systemd.

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[corychristison]

I've bren using Funtoo/Gentoo Linux on my personal machines for years.

I'm now trying it out for virtualized servers (OpenVZ and KVM) to perhaps provide an upgrade path from CentOS 6 when it becomes obsolete.

The benefits are there for me, as I am familiar with the environment and how the package manager works. It makes it easy to use specific packages and security updates are there.

I realize it may not be as well tested as CentOS or RHEL, but it has a sane init system and very heavily customizable in the situations you need it to be.

Why would anyone be surprised?

[adosch]

...I'm surprised this hasn't surfaced on Slashdot already...

I wish it did, but you just had to go and submit an article about it. I thought there was great hope in /.'ers to stop responding to systemd news and we finally stopped feeding the bear and it, indeed, went away...... from our rss feeds.

Unfortunately, the bear lives on.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck off retarded, nothing optional about that shit

= 'I don't know a fucking thing about it but I hate it anyway.'

Re:Adolf hitler, lennart p, donald t

[PopeRatzo]

Adolf Hitler, Lennart Poettering, Donald Drumpf. All of german / austrian origin, and all horrible criminals.

But at least Adolf Hitler never used systemd. And few people know that the fuhrer was a terrific dancer, and could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon...two coats!

https://youtu.be/D6llaZefJDc

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Dagger2]

Realistically, the Linux ecosystem forces you to pick between running a minor distro that you don't want to use, running a major distro with systemd removed (with broken functionality) or giving up and using systemd.

I suppose you could technically call that "not forcing" on the basis that you made the choice to use Linux in the first place, but... nope. Still being forced.

does not replace mount

[JonathanP.Bennett]

When I first read this on Phoronix, it appeared that systemd was replacing the mount command. This is not the case. It is wrapping the mount command. That seems to be an important distinction. Replacing mount would be crazy and pointless. Handling mounts more intelligently during startup would be welcome. So far, this seems to be the latter instead of the former.

Re:and in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well duh, of course systemd will have its own editor. How else are you going to be able to fix your configuration when the system won't boot? Do you think that Lennart will ever add a keystroke to cancel starting a broken unit during boot? I mean, you could ctrl-c most service startup scripts in SysV init, and if init could do it, then it must be wrong.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[mark-t]

There are major distros that are systemd free, and not only because systemd was removed from them, but because they never had it (Slackware)... or at least only have it as a non-required option (Gentoo).

Re:Adolf hitler, lennart p, donald t

[lucm]

can you elaborate about the motives of Microsoft to attack Poettering's character? Like any Slashdot reader I know Microsoft has spent billions to inject controversial statements in Slashdot threads over the years, but this time I don't see the rationale.

The way Poettering and his cronies are slowly transforming Linux in a large blackhole of centralized control seems to be something Microsoft would approve of. Or are you implying that as Microsoft is now embracing Linux, with SQL Server and Powershell ported to Linux, they are now mortal ennemies with anyone trying to bring Linux down?

This plot is getting very hard to follow.

Slack Off

[flyingfsck]

I use Slackware, so I don't need to know what it is all about. Thanks Pat!

Re:Slack Off

[ruir]

Using Jessie *without* systemd here, at work and at home. Slackware seems more interesting every day that goes by, though I have already a few FreeBSD servers.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[shoor]

To some extent, any complex system is going to force changes on users. Remember switching from a.out to ELF? Systemd happens to be more controversial than most.

I haven't studied systemd from the standpoint of technical merit, but apparently it was forced on developers by the powers at the top in an undemocratic way, which to me is mighty suspicious. Somewhere I read that the real reason to push systemd had to do with its LGPL licensing. That could be a motivation for undemocratic foisting.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Billly Gates]

Well if the next version of SystemD autoupdates itself where no admin options are available to turn this off where the orderings of boot daemons can randomly change causing a lockup, where only RedHat Enterprise 8 gives you the power to change how it is updated then you may have a point.

FYI Windows Server 2016 is going this route too! Not just Windows desktop where to get security you must apply 100% of previous patches in one big download.

It worked so well for Firefox after all.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[lucm]

I don't understand what you're running on those RHEL 6 machines. Even with RHEL 7 the repos are antiquated, near obsolete. Java 7 (no hotspot of course), PHP 5.4, no redis, no Mongo, no nginx. No nodejs or python3 except in RHSC and it's at best a shaky solution with bad support.

I mean, almost any major app that gets installed on RHEL throws a handful of "this version of x is no longer supported, this version of y is no longer supported". It's nearly impossible to get anything running without adding non-supported repos like epel, remi and others. For God's sake their version of "mail" doesn't even support adding headers, that's something I have seen only on old HPUX or AIX.

I guess if it's just file servers or web servers for old stuff it can work, but really it's five years behind or more. I like their support, they're fast and competent, but the rusty repo is a big showstopper in many projects.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Billly Gates]

If FreeBSD is not an option for your boss then perhaps you could learn how to use it?

After all some of us are stuck administering Windows. That previous story where Windows 7 will get updates pushed that are big and include every patch as cumulative? Windows Server 2016 is going that route!!

Shit I wish systemD was my worse fears if I was in Unix land at work.

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Billly Gates]

I read KVM was ported or is being ported to FreeBSD. I wonder how enterprise ready it is?

Hmmm how bad could it be?

[birukun]

Systemd-logind must be restarted every ~1000 SSH logins to prevent a ~25s delay

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu...

I am sure putting all the eggs in one basket will be fine, in the long run

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[Anonymous Coward]

That bug shows that it was fixed by a dbus patch and that the systemd part was Invalid.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[Anonymous Coward]

read the issues notes, it's actually dbus.... get your facts straight please.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[thegarbz]

hahhaha yeah because SSH login delays haven't been an issue in Ubuntu for the past 5 years already. No seriously there have been bugs reported, forum complaints, and issues with long delays due to SSH logins since I first started using Ubuntu with version 8.04. Curiously though it stopped around the 12.04 LTS version but re-emerged on a fresh install year later (non LTS), then disappeared again with version 15.10 and doesn't appear to be a problem on 16.04 (non LTS).

Interesting comment about eggs in a basket though, especially given that things are fine, other than a minor delay.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[thegarbz]

To be clear I'm talking about SSH login delays in general not being an issue in 16.04. I can't say I've tried going up to 1000, but hey in previous releases I had problem with login numero uno.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[LichtSpektren]

"I am sure putting all the eggs in one basket will be fine, in the long run"

I'm sure you're currently maintaining forks of the Linux kernel, X.org, coreutils, gcc, etc. -- right? Because otherwise we're all putting all of our eggs in one basket.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[jittles]

hahhaha yeah because SSH login delays haven't been an issue in Ubuntu for the past 5 years already. No seriously there have been bugs reported, forum complaints, and issues with long delays due to SSH logins since I first started using Ubuntu with version 8.04. Curiously though it stopped around the 12.04 LTS version but re-emerged on a fresh install year later (non LTS), then disappeared again with version 15.10 and doesn't appear to be a problem on 16.04 (non LTS).

Interesting comment about eggs in a basket though, especially given that things are fine, other than a minor delay.

I've been using Ubuntu for my home server since the 8.04 LTS release and have never seen a long SSH delay unless I mistype the password. That delay is intentional. Have you seen it with any other distros? I've not once complained about SSH login time all the way back to 2.4 versions of the kernel (though that was on an embedded platform by... I forget who - one of those companies that specializes in embedded distros. Gah that was a long time ago)

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[swillden]

Systemd-logind must be restarted every ~1000 SSH logins to prevent a ~25s delay

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu...

Except... it wasn't a systemd bug at all. Per comment #16:

Ok, with everyone confirming that the systemd patch is not required, I am closing the systemd part of the bug as 'Invalid' - let's only concentrate on the dbus part here. That being said, I would not like to release a new patch for dbus downstream if the patch hasn't been fully reviewed and approved upstream. In this case I would propose to wait a bit and see if a finalized patch will be available.

Not that the presence of one bug in systemd would indicate that the whole approach is a bad idea... but it's rather funny that the one example you pick turns out not to be a systemd bug at all.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[Junta]

I think dbus gets a pass *way* too much for the crap it causes. I think people only started noticing when systemd started to depend upon it so heavily for core function. Of course, a good criticicsm is that systemd shouldn't incur such dependencies for core functions, and that it shares some blame for dbus problems which used to only screw up desktop applications are now screwing with core services or servers.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[Ken D]

Typically delays around successful ssh connections have something to do with name resolution problems (on the sshd host trying to figure out which host is making the inbound connection). The delay is due to waiting for a timeout.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[Barsteward]

well, knock me down with a feather. software has bugs. shit, i never knew that.

ever check the kernel bug list or do you think there isn't one because the kernel is so good, it doesn't have bugs?

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[thegarbz]

have never seen a long SSH delay

That's good. I've never had a problem with Windows 10. That doesn't change the fact that it's out there and that there's message boards full of issues. Some of them are very well documented, e.g. the default behaviour of many Ubuntu versions was to reverse lookup DNS on connection regardless if it had the capability to do so. Interestingly enough the first google search was related to 12.04 LTS and avahi, a version which I personally had no issues with.

Point is that there's millions of systems out there very few alike, but as the parent says systemd is the source of every problem because he's never had an issue before.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[thegarbz]

Indeed that's one thing I've never understood. What's the purpose of reverse lookup of DNS on connect? Why not just log the IP and let the the sys admin do a reverse lookup if he has an issue with a client?

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[jittles]

have never seen a long SSH delay

That's good. I've never had a problem with Windows 10. That doesn't change the fact that it's out there and that there's message boards full of issues. Some of them are very well documented, e.g. the default behaviour of many Ubuntu versions was to reverse lookup DNS on connection regardless if it had the capability to do so. Interestingly enough the first google search was related to 12.04 LTS and avahi, a version which I personally had no issues with.

Point is that there's millions of systems out there very few alike, but as the parent says systemd is the source of every problem because he's never had an issue before.

I wasn't trying to refute your claim that there was a problem. That's why I was asking if you had seen that delay with other distros because I was curious if there was some common bug in sshd or if there was some problem that appeared to be Ubuntu specific.

Re:Hmmm how bad could it be?

[thegarbz]

Ahh rightio :-)

In general the situations I've come across haven't been bugs in any specific package, but rather interactions and specific configurations. Slow SSH logins are common but a significant number of threads I've seen pop up all say [SOLVED] in the title.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Eristone]

Some of us actually know how to do more than yum -y install. You know -- that old fashioned "compile from source"? Or even find an rpm.

amd?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember automount. It's still shipped in places.

Fiox pulseaudio first.

[Anonymous Coward]

I will start using systemd when pulseaudio is fixed!

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[buchanmilne]

In our service-provider environment, about 1/3rd of all our services have been migrated to RHEL7 (about 120 VMs) so far. I haven't had a single problem with systemd.

I am actually requiring specific motivation from any team wanting to run RHEL6, because system means 1)less divergence from upstream, 2)portability between distros

Any decent config managrment system should be able to handle systemd vs sysvinit (ansible does). But then sysvinit scripts will work just fine on RHEL7 with the same commands.

Re:Devuan is a Debian distrro not shipping system

[maglor_83]

What the hell is a "disttro"?

It's a misspelling of 'distrro', which is itself a misspelling of 'distro', which is a shortened form of 'distribution'. Glad to be of service.

Re:Devuan is a Debian distrro not shipping system

[Zontar The Mindless]

A bit of nothing intended only to distract small minds.

Re:and in other news...

[bferrell]

Release early, release often! Who cares if it doesn't work right?

Right along with "We had a new shiny idea and announced that was to deprecated. Now re-write all of the working code we broke when we did that"

Re:Since '85?!

[bferrell]

No actually old farts are being hired in droves. We're not "snowflakes" in need of constant coddling and stroking. We understand we work to pay our bills and be of service to our employers... Not fulfill our dream selves. Great if our job can be fulfilling, but not really necessary.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Tailhook]

a major distro with systemd removed (with broken functionality)

While this is mostly true for those hosting their own systems, one of the larger pieces of the Linux `ecosystem' today is AWS. The heavily used Amazon Linux AMI has the traditional SysV init and Amazon has not indicated that they intend to move to systemd. This at least ensures that it will not be possible to entirely neglect SysV init methods; if it doesn't run on EC2 it's broken for many people, and indeed there are cases of commercial software vendors discovering that their paying customers need SysV init compatibility for this reason.

I personally haven't had problem with systemd anywhere I've had to deal with it, and I've become comfortable working with it. The doomsayers predicted all manner of problems with systemd. They were wrong as far as I know. A minor bug here and there, quickly fixed. Journalctl is very handy; a lot nicer than chasing creatively named log files hither and thither. On the other hand, when I deal with EC2 instances and SysV init I'm fine with that as well. I understand both the rational for systemd and the reasons behind Amazon staying with SysV init; I'm happy to live with both.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[lucm]

Some of us actually know how to do more than yum -y install. You know -- that old fashioned "compile from source"? Or even find an rpm.

The point is not "duh give me teh rpms", the point is why the fuck would you pay $2,000 per cpu per year to get a polite "piss off" from Red Hat whenever support is needed because you installed (from source or other) a version or software that is not in their repo. That's like renting a car that has no radio and bragging that you can go to Best Buy to get a car radio installed in it.

If you want the general Red Har ecosystem but you rely on non-supported software, use CentOS for free and be done with it.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck off retarded, nothing optional about that shit

You know you have won when the other side resorts to profanity.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[donaldm]

There are major distros that are systemd free, and not only because systemd was removed from them, but because they never had it (Slackware)... or at least only have it as a non-required option (Gentoo).

Well according to Distro Watch Slackware rates 16 and Gentoo rates 36 on the list of page hits so they must be major distibutions.

Re:and in other news...

[ruir]

Your forgot including a DNS server and a web server in systemd; and running Java and p-code.

Sigh.

[ledow]

Anyone else read the bit about automatic fsck of FAT filesystems on USB insertion?

I'm presuming that it'll be optional but still - way to fuck everyone's USB sticks and SD cards up.

Auto-fsck is a stupid idea. At worst, do it read-only and warn (like Windows does). But just fixing up the filesystem without asking the user first? A good way to trash stuff.

Re:Sigh.

[gweihir]

Same quality-level as the rest of this malware...

Re:and in other news...

[Antique Geekmeister]

And compiler, and glibc.

My biggest concern is that it's not compatible with anything *but* the Linux concern. It's the strongest technical reason I currently see to abandon Linux in favor of more stable, modular components in BSD based operating systems.

Really?

[golodh]

And there was me thinking that Systemd enjoyed acceptance among many distro maintainers and end-users (me for example).

I'm not a kernel programmer and I don't particularly care about whether functionality is spread across binaries or integrated. I want it to "just work" on my desktop and server machine with minimum fuss. I have more than enough to do when the underlying system "just works" without being bogged down by sysadmin details. Ok?

Plus I'm persuaded by the automatic filesystem cleanup this wrapper does for USB sticks, which I happen to use on a regular basis.

As a matter of fact, I think that each and every commenter who howls about systemd being the work of the devil should sit a (modest) examination in kernel programming and a basic one in system administration. Those who fail to obtain at least 70% marks should have all their slashdot posts and comments on the subject wiped.

Call it a professional deformation: in my workplace I (and most of my colleagues) like to shut up people who don't know what the hick they're talking about. Our time is too precious to allow it to be wasted in that way. We're truly authoritarian and fascist in that respect, and we've obtained excellent results with, and broad support for, that policy for over 15 years.

Re:Really?

[LichtSpektren]

I want it to "just work" on my desktop and server machine with minimum fuss.

The kind of "just work" that systemd represents has been available from Microsoft for years, why don't you just go there, and leave us alone?

The complaint is not that it exists, but that those of us who don't like it find that we have to jump through so many hoops to avoid it. And that goes for both Microsoft and systemd.

What you're saying is that Linux should be broken out of the box, and that if I want things to work, I should lock-in to a vendor that screws me over instead of using Linux that works.

Do you have any idea how insane you sound?

Re:Really?

[passionplay]

I think you're fascism is well-placed. You the person that ensures I will always have a job. When a drive fails under Windows, Windoes keeps trying to fix it and makes things worse. When you try to recover files from windows (as most users have tried), Windows starts corrupting things all over the place. I tell my friends, when you have a problem with your drive, turn your computer off and bring it to me. I will recover all your files if you give ma drive of equal size. Why? Because Linux will never FSCK removable media unless I tell it. It will not even access files, FAT or any other content. I can clone the drive under linux with removable media without danger of reading the contents more than once and making the drive seek only forwards as fast as it can go. 99% recovery rate. With the proposed SystemD update, I can no longer do this. Because of the hidden secret sauce that causess an FSCK on removeable media. THIS is the problem. It's the automatic FSCK and MOUNTING. The POINT of a Linux system is that automount is at the user's discretion. Not the operating system. SystemD, like Windows is removing the ability of the USER to choose to do something. And like the other areas where SystemD has run rampant, the first step is embrace - then extend, and then extinguish. Lesson learned from Microsoft.

Re:Really?

[passionplay]

Agreed - so we can recover data from files Microsoft Windows can't without paying extra for the service.

Re:Really?

[passionplay]

It's not broken. It's a choice. The auto-mount DOES work already. If there is a problem, the user can fix it now. In the future, the problem cannot be repaired BEFORE it is open for the OS to make it worse.

Re:Really?

[LichtSpektren]

Then disable OS auto-mounting. Now everybody gets what they want.

Re:Really?

[Barsteward]

"The complaint is not that it exists, but that those of us who don't like it find that we have to jump through so many hoops to avoid it" well, thats just tough shit for you if you aren't capable of downloading and installing a different distro to suit your needs.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[DrXym]

No one is forced to do anything they don't want in Linux. If you don't like what one dist does, go to another. If no dist serves your need, then make your own. As it happens there is already a systemd-free dist called Devuan. Knock yourself out with it. Maybe you should even disable updates lest you inadvertently install some improvement.

I'd like to share a revelation I've had...

[sciengin]

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify systemD and I realized that it is not actually software. Every software package on Linux instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but SystemD does not. It moves to an area and multiplies and multiplies until every other service is consumed and the only way it can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. SystemD is a disease, a cancer of this Platform. It is a plague and we are the cure.

[Lobby Scene follows]

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[DrXym]

Dists didn't choose systemd because they had a gun pointed to their heads. They chose it because it is demonstrably better than either sysvinit or upstart.

left-pad

[Anonymous Coward]

Said "do one thing and do it well" doctrine ultimately leads to NPM-gate.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome-based distros did have a metaphorical gun pointed at their heads.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Dists didn't choose systemd because they had a gun pointed to their heads. They chose it because it is demonstrably better than either sysvinit or upstart.

This. A thousand times this.
I hear over and over, ad nauseam, repeated examples on how systemd causes trouble/problems/whatever.
Not once has anyone anyone been able to explain (so that I would understand) how it improves over the old setup. I'm not a professional Linux admin. I don't want to be. I don't have time to study up on it. But I do maintain several Linux boxes, which I use daily for my work. I'm not you grandmother, who doesn't care how it works, because they never need to bother. I need to know what is happening on my box. And systemd just because it is different from sysv init causes trouble for me. Even if systemd would work flawlessly. This is what systemd proponents seem to not grok.

And to whoever now wants to retort with the obvious ad hominem: I'm not alone (as you can see from the numerous objections). And as long as systemd proponents fail to address us, we will see it as a step in the wrong direction.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[thegarbz]

A page hit ranking is borderline useless for classifying how "major" a distribution is when we're talking about systemd, something that is predominantly complained about by system admins which may or may not run hundreds of headless boxes without any web browsers.

Page hit ranking is good for deciding which distro is popular for desktop users who by-enlarge couldn't give a shit about systemd.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[silentcoder]

Better for distro maintainers != better for users or better for Linux.

Better is an ENTIRELY subjective thing. Better at what ? Better *how* ?

Whether something is demonstrably better depends on what your chosen measurements are. That's like saying a Boeing 747 is demonstrably better a motorcycle.
Whether or not the statement is true depends entirely on the job description. If the job description is 'ferrying lots of people from coast to coast" then it's true, if the job description is "getting to the other side of town with minimal traffic problems" then it's utterly false.

No systemd is NOT better than anything by many, many measures. The only thing it is consistently better at is making distro maintainers' jobs easier. That's not a bad thing, but it's the wrong metric. Here in my country we have a similar issue in the medical insurance field. The largest local insurer by a long shot is also demonstrably the worst insurer you can have. They frequently refuse to pay claims they are liable for (relying on the imbalance of power their wealth gives them should a client choose to sue). Their customer service is absolutely atrocious.

So how the hell did they get to be the biggest insurer ? Because the deals they offer employers is demonstrably the best in the market. They save employers lots of money, so employers make them the default insurance offered - and employees are stuck with the worst insurance imaginable.

That's pretty much the relationship with systemd and distro-maintainers versus users.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[thegarbz]

and those who want the management capabilities of systemd for services can still use it, albeit with it not functioning as PID 1

Yeah let's have all the features of a software package without giving it what it requires.

Personally I just wish my computer would boot to the desktop and open a web browser. We can run the system kernel re-written in Javascript just fine and expect the same functionality right?

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Entrope]

Outsourcing security ("as a service") seldom works out well in the end.

M.C.P.

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep hearing about this SystemD thing. Is this the OS that Linux runs on?

Actually, they explained what SystemD is quiet well in the precient 1982 film Tron. Except back then it was called the M.C.P. (Master Control Program) :

I think it's about time we start calling SystemD by it proper name again: the Master Control Program.

EOL

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[silentcoder]

You clearly have no idea what a strawman argument even is. You took the adoption of systemD by distro maintainers and made a claim (with no evidence) to explain it.
I merely pointed out how meaningless your claim is.
I didnt misrepresent your argument by focussing on a tiny bit of it. I addressed everything you said.
Its not a strawman when your argument really was that weak.

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[DrXym]

Er, no you built a straw man argument. Proclaiming systemd to only be better for maintainers, that it couldn't possibly be better for users, making bizarre analogies between 747s and motorcycles (WTF) and attempting to conclude that because of this it couldn't better. None of which I said.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[twokay]

I'm sorry, your post is far too rational for the internet. You need an opinion that shows that your choice is right and the other choice is wrong, and you need to loudly defend your position, NOW!

Re:Windows 2000 called, said Linux sucks

[gweihir]

Poettering said USB does not work. Anybody else did not have a problem. Until now...

Re:sounds nice, but...

[gweihir]

Got a reference for that? If true, I hope they gave the systemd cretins the finger.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[LichtSpektren]

Well, yes... Most importantly RHEL6 / CentOS6. Those of us using Linux in business/enterprise settings are mostly running that, and that's mostly what we care about. The time limit on that is what we're sweating.

And I'm sure you have some statistics to back that up, right? Otherwise you're FUDding out of your ass.

Re:Windows 2000 called, said Linux sucks

[LichtSpektren]

Poettering said USB does not work. Anybody else did not have a problem. Until now...

That's funny, I read the blog post and I didn't see anything anywhere about USB not working.

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[silentcoder]

> Proclaiming systemd to only be better for maintainers
I never said that. I said it is definitely better for maintainers - but the criteria they use are not the same as users.

>that it couldn't possibly be better for users
Nope, never said that either. I never said it couldn't possibly better for users. Just that the adoption by systems does not equate to being better for users. It may be better for some users. What I will say is that it cannot possibly be better for ALL users - because NOTHING can be - no piece of software could ever, possibly, achieve that because users do not all have identical use-cases. The lower-level and more basic the software (and systemD operates at a pretty damn low level) the more impossible it becomes for there ever to be a universally 'better' solution.

>making bizarre analogies between 747s and motorcycles (WTF)
There was nothing bizarre about that analogy - though apparently you aren't very bright. The analogy simply demonstrated what I said: there is no such thing as a demonstrably better tool - 'better' is contextual and depends on use-case. There is no one tool that is better for EVERY use case. Hell even at the kernel level no two distro's ship with identical kernels - they all have their own custom patches and configs to fit their target demographic's major use-cases and even then most distro's ship with several different kernel configs to meet more than one likely use-case. Ubuntu for example ships a very different kernel with their server edition compared to their desktop edition.

If there's a strawman here - it's your bizarre misrepresentation of my argument and utterly flagrant lies about what I said.

> and attempting to conclude that because of this it couldn't better
Again - I never said that. I proved that there is no such thing as BEING 'better'. It CAN'T be better. It can only better AT something. It is fairly universally 'better' at meeting distro maintainers needs - it is NOT universally better at meeting user's needs - it's EASY to please distro maintainer (a small number of people) - and impossible to better for users (a massive and very diverse set of people with extremely divergent use-cases).

I never claimed that SystemD couldn't be better for some users, I did say (and proved) that it's impossible for it to be better for all users.

Had it stuck to being an init system (you only compared it with other init systems) - this would be more viable, it is possible to create an init system that is very good for a very large percentage of people - which is why there were never very many init systems. A few different ones met almost all needs. But systemD is a LOT more than an init system and NOTHING can be better at ALL the things it does for ALL the many things people may need. When it added logind - the odds of being better for a significant number of people got cut in half, with every additional tool those odds get cut in half again.
Now my actual argument is that SystemD destroys the lego-block model that is the foundation of what made unix survive for nearly 60 years across numerous major revolutions. When Unix was invented nobody saw PC's coming - yet unix smoothly transitioned onto them, nobody had seen smartphones coming but unix transition to work there - it runs everything from the largest supercomputer clusters to the smallest embedded devices. It has survived because it's lego-block design of extremely loosely-coupled tools could be rebuilt into whatever the hell you needed with very, very little effort. SystemD takes an ever-larger set of those blocks and replaces them with tightly-coupled tools which cannot be put together in different ways and cannot have individual blocks easily replaced.
This definitely makes it impossible for it to be better for users because the ONLY thing that can ever be universally 'better' for users is being able to change the system to suit your needs- no programmer can ever know everybody's best setup but everybody can know their OWN best setup. But even for thos

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[jittles]

Here in my country we have a similar issue in the medical insurance field. The largest local insurer by a long shot is also demonstrably the worst insurer you can have. They frequently refuse to pay claims they are liable for (relying on the imbalance of power their wealth gives them should a client choose to sue). Their customer service is absolutely atrocious.

United Health Care? is that you? Definitely the worst health insurance company I have ever seen in the US.

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[aquacrayfish]

I don't normally like interjecting discussions between people, but at least read what the person said. On the smaller point, the analogy was pretty damned clear if you just read the sentence before that. The larger point ties into not knowing what a straw man is. Your claim was that it was better for maintainers, while the counter was that, despite that being true, it can and has been argued that systemd is not necessarily better for users. That assertion is not predicated on contradicting an earlier statement. It was building on your original claim (users vs maintainers).

You may disagree that it isn't better for users, but it depends on what metrics you choose. A lot of people don't think so. If you disagree that users don't have it better with systemd, then defend that stance.

Simple question to those knowlegable of SystemD

[Qbertino]

Simple honest question to those knowlegable of SystemD

Ok, to I want to do this (I'll try using generic laymans terms so I dear not insult anybody using the *wrong* technical term):

I'm using Linux (Ubuntu 16 LTS to be precise) and this computer of mine boots up as wanted. So far so good.
Now, when the computer has finished booting, I want to launch a script or a set of scripts that in turn launch some programms I want to launch upon boot. I'm talking non-pointy-click-user autolaunch here, like maintainance stuff, developer servers & databases, special tools running in the background etc.

And here's the question:
How do I do this on/with SystemD? What do I need for it and what should I know / what concept do I have do grasp to achieve this?

To give an impression of what I'm used to:
There used to be this thing called "init process" on Linux that had another thing called "runlevels". A runlevel basically was a set of incrementally named scripts in a directory with basically the runlevels number as a name. You would edit the scripts in that directory to do what you wanted (or add your own script with an incremental number) and then launch said runlevel typing "init [RunlevelNumber]" in the cli.

I wonder how this goes in SystemD and how complicated it may be. Is there a GUI Tool for this? I heard that these scripts are basically binaries in SystemD and I have to compile them? Is that true?

Please help me add my on "launch-stuff" to SystemD, and please give me the easyest way that is still in the area of the "SystemD" philosophy.

Thanks for your help.

Re:Simple question to those knowlegable of SystemD

[LichtSpektren]

systemd supports old shell scripts. The easier way is to make a unit file: https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind...

Re:Simple question to those knowlegable of SystemD

[Eunuchswear]

I wonder how this goes in SystemD and how complicated it may be. Is there a GUI Tool for this? I heard that these scripts are basically binaries in SystemD and I have to compile them? Is that true?

Nope. If you're writing for systemd you'd write simple config files rather than init scripts (man systemd will point you to man systemd-system.conf for details). If you want to keep backwards compatibility you can keep using init scripts. I don't know how Ubuntu have dealt with upstart compatibility.

You don't need GUI tools. On my Debian systems I can use either the old Debian tools (update-initrc.d, invoke-initrc.d), the Redhat inspired service(8) stuff or the native systemctl(1) command.

All systemd config is simple text files. There is no "registry".

Re:Simple question to those knowlegable of SystemD

[grumpy-cowboy]

What if I have a new shell script instead of an old one? ;)

You know what's shocking?

[Eunuchswear]

There is nothing on the Devuan mailing list about this.

It's almost like they've given up.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[LichtSpektren]

Realistically, the Linux ecosystem forces you to pick between running a minor distro that you don't want to use, running a major distro with systemd removed (with broken functionality) or giving up and using systemd.

I suppose you could technically call that "not forcing" on the basis that you made the choice to use Linux in the first place, but... nope. Still being forced.

I'm forced to use Crest toothpaste. I could use some toothpaste I don't want to use, but that's... I'm being FORCED man! Don't you see it!?

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Eunuchswear]

Somewhere I read that the real reason to push systemd had to do with its LGPL licensing.

Well, that's an interesting new piece of nonsense.

Still nonsense though, and I preferred the crazier CIA/NSA conspiracy theories.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Eunuchswear]

Someone who recommends Devuan is a systemd shill now. How odd.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[silentcoder]

I'm not in the US. I was talking about Discovery Health.

Other South Africans here who have ever had dealings with them will very likely agree.

No auto-fsck please...

[Junta]

Unless you run it in check-only mode. I have seen systems blindly try to detect and *correct* problems in a filesystem cause tremendous harm. Even Windows prompts the user before taking such measures on removable media. The fact of the matter is you may have some unexpected situation that would be corrupted by that action. Maybe a newer version of the filesystem your version of fsck mistakens for corrupt. Maybe it had one type of partition table at some point now it has a new one you don't recognize, but you see a backup block and corrupt the storage by restoring backup block of what you do recognize.

The fact of the matter is, users should be asked/made to take corrective action in something like fixing a filesystem.

Re:No auto-fsck please...

[dyhanan]

Thank for your information Paket Umroh Desember

Re:No auto-fsck please...

[dyhanan]

Unless you run it in check-only mode. I have seen systems blindly try to detect and *correct* problems in a filesystem cause tremendous harm. Even Windows prompts the user before taking such measures on removable media. The fact of the matter is you may have some unexpected situation that would be corrupted by that action. Maybe a newer version of the filesystem your version of fsck mistakens for corrupt. Maybe it had one type of partition table at some point now it has a new one you don't recognize, but you see a backup block and corrupt the storage by restoring backup block of what you do recognize.

The fact of the matter is, users should be asked/made to take corrective action in something like fixing a filesystem.

Paket Umroh Desember

Re:sounds nice, but...

[Junta]

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...

The short of it is systemd decided all of a sudden the 'right' behavior was to assume processes were killable when your shell exits, unless they took some special measures to explicitly inform systemd directly that it realy really really meant to persist. screen, tmux, et al were suggested to change to support yet another paradigm for indicating wanting to *really* stay alive after session logout.

IIRC, it was all caused because some processes like pulseaudio were abusing the existing paradigm of requesting to run in a way that would persist beyond session exit and failing to close themselves. Rather than correct those bugs, they decided it would be easier to introduce *another* layer of requesting such persistence.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[jittles]

I'm not in the US. I was talking about Discovery Health.

Other South Africans here who have ever had dealings with them will very likely agree.

Oooh do you mind me asking what part of ZA? Such a beautiful country. I want to go back and explore some more. I only saw the eastern and western cape, though.

Re:Windows 2000 called, said Linux sucks

[gweihir]

Poettering said USB does not work. Anybody else did not have a problem. Until now...

That's funny, I read the blog post and I didn't see anything anywhere about USB not working.

Fundamental engineering principle: If it is not broken, do not fix it. Hence either it was broken, or Poettering is even more incompetent.

"In the case of Godwin v. Emacs, how find ye?"

[Pseudonymous Powers]

I've never bothered to educate myself enough about system internals to really understand the whole systemd saga. But I've been following the story closely as I can from this distance, and, as a fairly neutral observer, I'm finally ready to take a side:

I think we should just give Czechoslovakia to systemd. They really need the lebensraum, and they've promised not to ask for anything else. Peace in our time!

Re:Devuan is a Debian distrro not shipping system

[Eunuchswear]

RU sure?

apt-cache depends samba | grep systemd
... crickets

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[silentcoder]

I live in Cape Town but I'm originally from the North.

Re:sounds nice, but...

[LichtSpektren]

This isn't in any way a forced dependency. It's a different default behavior for the systemd daemon. Debian decided not to adopt the change in the default config and nohup still works the way you expect it to.

Re:Windows 2000 called, said Linux sucks

[LichtSpektren]

Poettering said USB does not work. Anybody else did not have a problem. Until now...

That's funny, I read the blog post and I didn't see anything anywhere about USB not working.

Fundamental engineering principle: If it is not broken, do not fix it. Hence either it was broken, or Poettering is even more incompetent.

But it's not "fixing" anything. The systemd team decided to add functionality for people who want to use it. If you don't want to use it, nothing's changed.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[TemporalBeing]

There are major distros that are systemd free, and not only because systemd was removed from them, but because they never had it (Slackware)... or at least only have it as a non-required option (Gentoo).

Well according to Distro Watch Slackware rates 16 and Gentoo rates 36 on the list of page hits so they must be major distibutions.

Consider this: Slackware is the last of the original Linux distros still active, with updates, etc. It's the origin for numerous distros - including many other major distros. Its authors are some of the top and moist respected in the LInux community.

Gentoo is the first real major source-based distro, and the origin distro for numerous other distros, the most famous being ArchLinux.

Know your distro history before trying to downplay the role a distro has.

Systemd the distro

[lucm]

Great! What can we do to speed up this process a bit, its about time that linux started to replace some of its aging, creaking old architecture with new tools liberated of old, out of date practices and effectively made a system which took care of the things I really dont give a shit about.

My computer is not my work, I use it to do my work, I do not want to spend time configuring it, I want to spend time doing my work and enjoying myself, I really couldnt give a fuck how to configure it 90% of the time.

I think you summarize the problem pretty well. Systemd is a desktop solution for people who essentially want a Macbook.

What would be great? Having systemd only in specialized desktop distributions. Not on servers and not on desktop for power users. Even better: systemd should be a distribution itself, not be a part of other distributions. And it would also have the exclusivity of pulseaudio.

Re:Systemd the distro

[jedidiah]

I am not even sure that wanting a Macbook is a good excuse for systemd.

Been there, did that, wasn't impressed, came back.

Pottering is like a politician desperately trying to tell you that the world is going to shit so that he can be the guy that comes in on the white horse.

Re:Systemd the distro

[Etcetera]

I think you summarize the problem pretty well. Systemd is a desktop solution for people who essentially want a Macbook.

What would be great? Having systemd only in specialized desktop distributions. Not on servers and not on desktop for power users. Even better: systemd should be a distribution itself, not be a part of other distributions. And it would also have the exclusivity of pulseaudio.

That's exactly it. If this were a GNOME or *DE toolkit focused on providing low level services for desktop environments, it'd be totally fine; well -- more accurately -- I wouldn't care. The problem is that by taking over PID 1 and forcing a paradigm shift or replacement of any number of other utilities, it's in the "core" instead of the desktop. It didn't need to be that way, and shouldn't have been. And if it *had* to, then it should have been a component of a new, forked, modern desktop distribution.

Instead it sucked up Fedora under subterfuge ("It'll be just like the upstart switch except 5.6% awesomer!") and Debian thanks to the bandwagon effect breaking a tie.

Re:Systemd the distro

[lucm]

I used to work with a DBA like that. The more the performance went down, the more "optimization" scripts he ran continuously. He talked a good game with management so he got away with it for a long time, even if the databases were delivering less i/o than a floppy disk (which he blamed on "bad sql written by incompetent developers" - which he refused to code review of course).

Then he threw a tantrum and left, and the first thing I did was kill all his optimization scripts. Instantly the databases started blasting data at speed never seen during the DBA reign.

There are not a lot of people with enough clout to get rid of this systemd crap. I hope one of them will take the mike at some point and save us all.

Re:sounds nice, but...

[LichtSpektren]

IIRC, it was all caused because some processes like pulseaudio were abusing the existing paradigm of requesting to run in a way that would persist beyond session exit and failing to close themselves. Rather than correct those bugs, they decided it would be easier to introduce *another* layer of requesting such persistence.

Sorry for the double post, but I just want to address this. systemd isn't a distro. If other Linux software is buggy or behaves abnormally, there's nothing the systemd maintainers can do to fix those programs. However, it IS the job of the service manager to prevent buggy software from interfering with unrelated programs/services, so it makes sense for systemd to need to manage this. You can validly criticize them for making some change that causes unexpected behavior, but again as I said in my other post, it's a config option that you can change if you want to, and some distros have already gone ahead by not adopting that option.

Re:Journalism

[Pseudonymous Powers]

4 paragraphs based on a Git commit. This is journalism. And promoted on Slashdot's main page.

Well, yeah, but it's a code change that adds another tool that duplicates an existing Linux tool to a highly controversial software package that its critics accuse of trying to slowly take over the entire toolspace. It definitely qualifies as news for [Linux] nerds, stuff that matters [to them].

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[TemporalBeing]

Dists didn't choose systemd because they had a gun pointed to their heads. They chose it because it is demonstrably better than either sysvinit or upstart.

Funny...I've had no issues on any system running SysV Init Script or Upstart. I've even built my own distros - from scratch - and managed them.

However, I have run into numerous issues with systemd-based distros because of systemd.

Sorry, but many distros are doing it because of not taking the option not to. Debian switched because a couple package maintainers made it a dependency and the Debian maintainers refused to make them make it optional - thus we now have Devuan which maintains that choice. Thus nearly all Debian derived distros don't have a choice but to use it either. (Devuan had a lot of trouble untwining systemd to keep it optional primarily due to the Debian decision not to keep it optional.)

So while there may not have been a gun to their head, it's been an oligarchy that has decided 'systemd is best for everyone' kind of decision when the vast majority don't want it.

Re:Journalism

[LichtSpektren]

4 paragraphs based on a Git commit. This is journalism. And promoted on Slashdot's main page.

Well, yeah, but it's a code change that adds another tool that duplicates an existing Linux tool to a highly controversial software package that its critics accuse of trying to slowly take over the entire toolspace. It definitely qualifies as news for [Linux] nerds, stuff that matters [to them].

How does it duplicate an existing tool? It uses and depends on mount, it doesn't replace it. If you read the Reddit post that Poettering make, he writes: "first of all, this doesn't replace util-linux' mount tool. Not at all. It just tells systemd to mount something, going through systemd's dependency logic. For the actual mount operation PID 1 will fork off util-linux' mount tool like it always did."

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[LichtSpektren]

So while there may not have been a gun to their head, it's been an oligarchy that has decided 'systemd is best for everyone' kind of decision when the vast majority don't want it.

May I see your source for the claim "the vast majority don't want it"?

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[lucm]

Outsourcing security ("as a service") seldom works out well in the end.

Do you have numbers or case studies to support that? Of course if you subscribe to a terrible product managed by a terrible organization it may not be an improvement. But on average, the sheer volume is enough to allow a provider to implement security measures that are far superior to what individual customers can afford.

It's like running your own power plant versus joining "the grid". You may feel like you have more control wih your own plant but you don't have the same resources as the power company to maintain, monitor and upgrade it.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[lucm]

Then you're paying $2,000 per cpu per year for what? Red Hat won't support PHP7, Redis and "many more" (not sure about exim). What's your motive for shelling out that money? Getting security patches for PHP 5.4 or memcached, which you don't use?

Can you mention one reason not to use CentOS instead if you're not using the software that Red Hat supports?

Re:Devuan is a Debian distrro not shipping system

[Eunuchswear]

Ah, samba is not installable in Devuan because the veteran Unix administrators made a rookie mistake. Got it.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[pnutjam]

$2000 /per cpu, come on, let's not exaggerate, it's only $1999.99 / 2 cpu's.

systemd vs emacs

[ilsaloving]

I'm not liking how systemd is taking over more and more OS functionality.

That's Emacs job.

Re:Since '85?!

[geek]

No actually old farts are being hired in droves. We're not "snowflakes" in need of constant coddling and stroking. We understand we work to pay our bills and be of service to our employers... Not fulfill our dream selves. Great if our job can be fulfilling, but not really necessary.

So what you're saying is your just old snowflakes?

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[pak9rabid]

...the point is why the fuck would you pay $2,000 per cpu per year to get a polite "piss off" from Red Hat whenever support is needed because you installed (from source or other) a version or software that is not in their repo.

You don't, you instead use CentOS.

Hater

[DaMattster]

I am a proud systemd hater! It is a giant step backward for Unix-like Operating Systems.

I though Open Source was great?

[Kwyj1b0]

Not trolling here, but I've been wondering why there is so much hate for System-D, when this is for open source projects?

Whenever someone says (on slashdot) that they don't like the features of an open source project, he gets a bunch of comments along the lines of "It's open source - just add the features you want or fork it and make your version. That's what is so great about open source".

What is different in this case? Clearly, lot of people don't like SystemD. Why are they complaining about it? If you don't like it, aren't you free to fork projects and make your own Debian derivative (for example) that is free of System-D?

I'm honestly curious why SystemD has this much power to break the "fork it, open source rules" argument.

Re:Of course it's "forced"

[Barsteward]

"The fact that I don't have the needed resources to create an alternative doesn't mean we should shut up." - change distros then or look up "linuxfromscratch" - you've got a computer, what more do you need?

"But that's not a reason to shut up when things go bad." as things haven't gone bad then its just whining from ignorance

"And it's even less a reason when there was an alternative that is now no longer available." you don;t look very far, do you?

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Barsteward]

bollox. poettering wrote a library for them to continue using consoled but they decided not to use it

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Barsteward]

you need to research it yourself, do not rely on forums like this for facts. all the negatives you see written are based on ignorance of the systemd project and people to lazy to look up what is true or false so they repeat what they read from ignorant posts.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[michaelamerz]

Well - my company maintains quite a number of Linux production environments. I have worked with Linux since version 0.95 so I have adapted to quite a number of flavors and variations over the years. I have build up experience, tools, procedures to deal with problems and emergencies. Those Linux servers need to run. My customers depend on me and my company to be able to address situations quickly. And I am not even talking about liability issues here. I am not afraid to learn - that's part of the business. systemd and it's quick pace taking over more and more services will make it difficult to fully understand. Though it has been around for a while, there is no long time experience. Linux has developed in an evolutionary way .. over several processor generations on a variety of platforms and millions and millions of installations covering anything from desktops to door knobs. systemd has been crafted on top of the Linux "tree" - without the benefits of an evolutionary experience. I won't take the risk to subject my customers to systemd. Not because I am lazy, not because I don't want to learn - but because I can't take chances with technology that I can't trust to be as reliable as the "old Linux". Systemd just doesn't have the track record. So we have started to migrate to *BSD. I will have to learn a lot (haven't worked with BSD style Unix since we migrated from SUNs to Linux) but our servers will run on a solid and dependable platform. And that makes all the difference.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Barsteward]

"but apparently it was forced on developers by the powers at the top in an undemocratic way," - why not provide a link for that statement? making wild claims need proof.

#RedmondHat ... the new meme

[knorthern knight]

Same mentality. You will take what we tell you to.

What gets people really annoyed is that Redhat / Poettering have hijacked mainstream linux. Yes, I understand that Redhat runs "services in the cloud". And that having VM's spin up a few seconds faster means they can run fewer VM's in reserve, and therfore save RAM/CPU/electricity and, most importantly for their shareholders, MONEY.

If Redhat had offered systemd/pulseaudio/avahi/dbus as "extra features" on their distro, no-one would've complained. The complaints come from the fact that Redmondhat is trying to push their crud down the throats of all linux users. They took advantage of the fact that some of the voting members on the Debian council were Redmondhat employees. When the Debian council voted on standardizing on one startup system, guess which way the Redmondhat employees voted? Since Debian is the base from which Ubunti+variants, plus a lot of other distros, build on, Redmondhat now brags about "widespread adoption" of systemd.

I run Gentoo, but even there, I can't totally escape Redmondhat. I stopped using GNOME long ago, because it was too bloated. So the fact that GNOME now has a gratuitously hard-coded dependancy on systemd didn't affect me. But I do use GNUMERIC, which seems to be the best spreadsheet. In Gentoo, you can see dependancies being pulled in. Years ago, GNUMERIC did not require harfbuzz and ghostscript, but now it does. And it requires GTK+3 which now requires dbus.

Years ago, OS/2 was my first love. When it flopped, I looked around for another non-Microsoft alternative. I fell in love with lightweight, snappy, modular GNU/Lin-ux. But now it has degenerated into bloated, slow, monolithic GNOME/Lenn-ax. Coincidentally, Arca Noae is expected to release ArcOS 5.0 later this year. http://www.techrepublic.com/ar... The 5.0 is the next version after OS/2 4.52, the last maintenance release by IBM. I may have no choice, but to go back.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Barsteward]

anti-systemd troll.

Re:Devuan is a Debian distrro not shipping system

[inode_buddha]

What the hell is a "disttro"?

It's an Italian version of Debian.

Re:Windows 2000 called, said Linux sucks

[Barsteward]

unfortunately he is anti-systemd and has blind spots so he imagines things (up as most anti-systemders do because they don't research the issue).

Re:systemd articles on Slashdot

[Barsteward]

you fairly new to slashdot and systemd related articles? :o)

Re:and in other news...

[TWX]

Am I the only one who cares that systemd is following the path of much of the rest of the Linux ecosystem in adding more and more features before bothering to extinguish all the bugs in the existing feature set? Has it proven that it should be gobbling up other features and breaking the old UNIX model of discreet chunks of competent tightly-focused code yet?

No, you're not the only one. I'm installing new boxes at home with Devuan because I like my Linux boxes to use Init. I am aware that this will be the more difficult path, but Debian seems to have violated its own rules regarding adding new packages to Stable after it's made stable.

I do not like all-in-one solutions, and my experiences with random problems with PulseAudio leaves me distrustful of other software from the same developer, and to me this looks like fixing something that isn't broken.

If Systemd becomes ubiquitous and unavoidable I'll look at other UNIX/UNIX-Like operating systems.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Megol]

Nobody forces anyone in open source software - just fork. Open source software is absolutely not democratic - it is a meritocracy where the people that does the work also are those that make decisions.

Re:systemd articles on Slashdot

[gaudior]

What part of auto-fsck is useful/necessary?

Re:Adolf hitler, lennart p, donald t

[Ol Olsoc]

hello m$ shill, please fetch your cheque at the counter. Good job!

Hold on. The Windows 10 Anniversary Update screwed up the printer, so the checks can't be printed.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[DeVilla]

Caldera, Yellow Dog & Turbolinux were also significant names from history. And is Gentoo really the first source based distro or just the "last of the first" since others like Sorcerer disappeared the way Yggdrasil did leaving us with Slackware?

Slackware will always be special to me as my first Linux distribution and I still consider switching back to Gentoo on occasion, but I have no delusion that these distro's role in history make them major distributions now.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Etcetera]

CentOS and RHEL are functionally identical, except for the 12-36h delay in updates and the specifics of update channel management.

That was one of the points I (GP) was trying to make... Looking at just official RHEL subscription numbers doesn't take into account the broader "RedHat-led ecosystem" of releases which are broadly (if not ABI) compatible.

Many orgs pay for RHEL licenses on mission-critical boxes and a sample of their own servers, then run CentOS on fleet boxes. OTOH, people working in densely virtualized environments might consider the hypervisors the critical ones and be willing to pay for them, getting unlimited VM guest licenses for free with it.

Re:systemd articles on Slashdot

[LichtSpektren]

I'd like to know that my device mounted cleanly before I do anything to its data. Seems like a worthy feature.

Re:Adolf hitler, lennart p, donald t

[Aighearach]

Well, for one thing, windows support of hot-swap mounting sucks.

The problem for linux has always been, while the situation is better than windows, it still sucks.

This will actually fix the problems for linux, and so the MS cruftiness will finally look low-tech.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[mark-t]

If systemd were actually better.... sure. Systemd solves things that were never really problems in the first place except for people who generally expect to be rebooting their machine almost every time they use it, and while this could be an admirable goal, the improvement is not significant, and the cost of doing so, completely breaking compatibility with init on a technical as well as philosophical level, is definitely not worth the price of admission.

Use younger 5 digits folk like editing with Pico

[Dareth]

Use younger 5 digits folk like editing with Pico

Pico for the win!!!!

Re:Of course it's "forced"

[Barsteward]

""Time and skills." - if you lack those then you have to suck it up and use either a distro with or without systemd

"And while I may not have the skills of the systemd devs, " if thats the case, you don;t really have the knowledge to rant and rave about something you know nothing about because all you are doing is parroting other ignorant posters.

"There are plenty of real issues with systemd.From bugs to features, design stupidities to its dependencies, not forgetiing the devs relations to the community. " now you are making things up, ALL software has bugs and for the rest of your comment about design and dependeicies, thats crap and its just a minority of whiney loud mouths complaining. Remember that empty vessels make the most noise

"Tell me what are the alternatives if I want a good up to date debian based distro without systemd?" - devuan, slackware, gentoo. but i guess you are admitting that a systemd distro is "up to date".

"A problem is that to use some of those alternatives, you have to jump through so many hoops that it isn't worth it at all. You choose the less bad of the two solutions." thats your choice, you have to wonder why the non-systemd distros cause you to jump through hoops .

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[fahrbot-bot]

There are systemd-free distros of Linux, you know. I can pretty confidently state that it will remain that way unless systemd should start to integrate itself into the kernel.

FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD ...

Re:Adolf hitler, lennart p, donald t

[jedidiah]

I am curious about what you think actually sucks.

I am not interested in lame trolling. I'm curious as to why you think I should care enough about this to change things.

That kind of applies to the whole thing really (systemd).

Re:Adolf hitler, lennart p, donald t

[Aighearach]

I'm up to page 13 of the comments in the article, and it is endlessly entertaining.

Paid trolls would never provide the same entertainment value, but they'd inject some quality FUD. This is like Elmer Fudd hunting redhat developers.

Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting Redhats!

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[DrXym]

See, you can't even fairly paraphrase what I wrote either. I didn't write it was better for maintainers, though I'm sure it is. I wrote that dists didn't have a gun pointed to their heads when they adopted it. I expect that decision takes into account the benefits to everyone. And yes the response was a straw man.

I'm sure the extremely shrill and vocal minority who don't like systemd (or upstart) can throw their weight behind Devuan. It could do with all the help it can get.

Everyone else, maintainers and users can benefit from a pid 1 system that improves start up times, security, logging, concurrency, service dependencies and still lets people invoke sysvinit scripts if they have reason to. It is curious how dists like Ubuntu, RHEL / Fedora et al manage to function in a completely satisfactory and stable fashion considering how some people like to imply they're built on sand.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[EndlessNameless]

and run systemd as Just Another Daemon, akin to xinetd, supervise, or your cluster management software

This is dangerous, as systemd expects to be PID 1. If it expects to be the root of userspace and isn't, there will probably be complications.

It's better to build a distro without systemd entirely than to try to hack it into pieces without careful planning.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it will be damn hard if it can be done. Already, the first attempt (by uselessd) has been abandoned.

Re:Adolf hitler, lennart p, donald t

[Ol Olsoc]

Wedhats

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Etcetera]

and run systemd as Just Another Daemon, akin to xinetd, supervise, or your cluster management software

This is dangerous, as systemd expects to be PID 1. If it expects to be the root of userspace and isn't, there will probably be complications.

It's better to build a distro without systemd entirely than to try to hack it into pieces without careful planning.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it will be damn hard if it can be done. Already, the first attempt (by uselessd) has been abandoned.

Among the many other issues with systemd, this sticks out.

Literally the only thing unique about PID 1 as such (besides obviously being the first process launched) is that it gets ownership of double-forked / parentless processes and related signaling. There should be no reason that systemd couldn't function as a standard sub-process, albeit with the reduced functionality of not being able to track processes that intentionally escape.

The general unwillingness to gracefully fall back to reduced functionality when not all the Kool-Aid has been drunken is a fine example of EEE principles in action.

Re:sounds nice, but...

[Junta]

The point being that it's what systemd upstream decided would be a good default behavior. This speaks to the mindset of the architects and how it factors to their general design.

Yes when they offer choices, distros can opt out. However they are inventing new paradigms where existing ones already serve.

Re:sounds nice, but...

[Junta]

Though one of the chiefly cited daemons (pulseaudio) is in the same ballpark with the same set of developers available to work it.

The problem with your logic is that at some point pulseaudio and the like could in turn decides it wants to declare itself as 'really wanting to persist' using the systemd mechanism, and again be running stray. Then systemd could add yet another layer of 'really *really* mean to persist. It's an arms race of crappy software. The question is 'why does the daemon *think* it needs to persist?' not 'how can we invent a way to ignore their request to persist and hope they don't update to the new scheme'.

Re:Adolf hitler, lennart p, donald t

[Aighearach]

I don't think you should care. If you don't have the problems that are being solved by systemd, you don't even have any reason to care.

It solves problems that people have. It solves them in the way that makes the systemd developers happy. So many sysadmins agree, that most distros adopt it.

If people don't agree, who cares?

Like if it was music. Maybe one person wants to listen to AC/DC, and I want to listen to Metallica. Both opinions are valid. There is no right or wrong answer. You might like one more than the other, but that is a very different claim that to claim that there is something wrong with my choice, only because yours is different. Maybe one radio station plays a lot of Metallica. Maybe most radio stations play a lot more Metallica than AC/DC, because they're professionals and they think that it is going to make them more money. Now, maybe you're feeling salty about that, because you'd rather listen to AC/DC. That doesn't mean you've been wronged. It is their own choice which to use.

Same with a distro. A distro chooses. As a user, maybe you choose what software you run, maybe somebody else does. Who cares? If you're the person choosing, then you make the choice you want. It is all open source. Complainers about systemd seem to have been out of class the day that they learned wtf software freedom means. It means that there is no conspiracy; there can't be a conspiracy because of SOFTWARE FREEDOM and excessive complaints about other people exercising their freedom in the "wrong" way is just worthless bullying. And it is bullying that has no chance to succeed, against because: Software Freedom .

The point isn't what sucks or doesn't suck. The point is that people want to do it this way, and that is their business. People who don't already know the details didn't even need to ask about it, to be honest.

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Entrope]

Do you have numbers or case studies to support your claim about the "on average" outcome? You're talking about a business model of moving valuable (or even critical) information into a third party's control, where you still have the same number of internal end users, the same operational requirements, the same amount of data stored -- but you now have to control the pipe to and from that service, trust in the vendor's employees, and live with their deployment schedules and glitches.

It's like owning your own car versus relying on public buses. You may feel like you're saving money by taking a bus, but you're more exposed to strangers peeking in, it doesn't cover most of the world, you have no real input on available destinations, and you're at the mercy of a third party to go anywhere at all.

RHEL - CentOS - Docker

[lucm]

Many orgs pay for RHEL licenses on mission-critical boxes and a sample of their own servers, then run CentOS on fleet boxes. OTOH, people working in densely virtualized environments might consider the hypervisors the critical ones and be willing to pay for them, getting unlimited VM guest licenses for free with it.

We've had that discussion at work, with the pro-RHEL arguing that since prod machines would be RHEL, dev and test machines should be too in order to avoid bad surprises down the road. We even considered having the full-blown hardening done already in dev to make sure our friends the developers didn't do something that wouldn't work in prod. Turns out this approach causes a huge dip in productivity, especially when chasing those mysterious selinux denials. Exciting the first few times because you feel like you're "doing the rigth thing" but soon enough you get a nosebleed just by typing semanage. Ansible helps a lot, but only once you've got the right recipe.

So we opted for dev=CentOS and everything else hardened RHEL. Of course this led to a bad case of "vm sprawling", going from 25-30 to 1000+ in 6 months. Then we looked at the average machine and noticed the app/vm ratio was very low, almost 1:1. So we started looking at mega-docker hosts for those use cases and it's been a blessing. When used properly to containerize an app, docker is very low maintenance, and the upgrade path is a lot smoother. And you can pile lots of containers on a same host.

We're still in early stages but already we shaved 200 vm. Less updates, less problems, less everything.

Re:RHEL - CentOS - Docker

[Etcetera]

We've had that discussion at work, with the pro-RHEL arguing that since prod machines would be RHEL, dev and test machines should be too in order to avoid bad surprises down the road. We even considered having the full-blown hardening done already in dev to make sure our friends the developers didn't do something that wouldn't work in prod. Turns out this approach causes a huge dip in productivity, especially when chasing those mysterious selinux denials. Exciting the first few times because you feel like you're "doing the rigth thing" but soon enough you get a nosebleed just by typing semanage. Ansible helps a lot, but only once you've got the right recipe.

Have you considered SELinux permissive everywhere in dev, with sign-off on QA? Depending on your app, of course, SELinux really does get easier once you get more and more used to it. audit2allow really is your friend... A day of letting your app run in permissive mode, then pipe the audit log for it through the policy maker and factor its needs into a coherent (and meaningful) policy, then just bump that as needed.

semanage can be a pain for booleans, but again it's mostly up-front work and then catching what breaks going forward.

Going back to the topic though, is there a significant difference between RHEL and CentOS in this regard? The vast majority of boxes I run on have been CentOS, but I typically dev on a RHEL in full SELinux enforcing and I haven't really noticed an issue except when there's a delay in a policy making it to the CentOS repos.

Re:RHEL - CentOS - Docker

[lucm]

Selinux does get somewhat easier, unless you constantly deal with new products/stacks/requirements.

Let's say you finally know inside out the rules that will let tomcat access files from a NFS share; the following day some team will have a project that relies on a "paster serve" web server, and by the time you figured that one out, someone else will come up with a problem with npm. Or with git clones done from within a php web service. Or rsync called in a ssh session initiated from a Ruby app. The fun never ends.

audit2allow can help when you have to fix something right away, but it doesn't really make for easily repeatable recipes unless you have enough time/patience to filter. Often there's a frustrating mix of booleans and labels to figure out, and if you're not careful you break other stuff.

So we ended up setting it to permissive in dev and enforcing in test/prod, and we warn project managers about the hardening process that is required when leaving dev. It works ok.

As for the differences between RHEL and CentOS when it comes to Selinux, there's a few things but only if you use special stuff from Red Hat like RHSC or gluster. Otherwise I'm fairly confident it works the same because once we have a recipe for a specific team we bake it in Ansible playbooks. And so far it hasn't been required to make special rules according to the distro, only the version (CentOS7 -> RHEL7, etc).

When it comes to versions, I would say that the biggest annoyance has been slight differences between all the cloud providers and hypervisors we use. Also the need to track down minor releases and how compatible they are (RHEL 7.2 vs centOS 7.15, etc). We have a good integration of our cmdb and Ansible inventory but sometimes it's difficult to figure out why something breaks on allegedly compatible versions.

Re: Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[silentcoder]

Nobody cares about PID1 its all the other tightly coupled pieces which are a bad thing.
Multics and VMS were doing great too... and went extinct overnight. Unix survived. DEC went from the biggest computer company in the world to bankrupt and sold for pennies i just 2 years. Unix survived.

Stallman chose unix not because he wanted to (in his own words it would be much more fun to build something new than reimplement what was already an ancient design) but because he understood why unix had outlived everything that came after it. Loosely coupled tools that rely on simple interfaces to connect rather than on code dependency. SystemD is making the same mistake that VMS and Multics and a dozen other OS's made and the only possible outcome is the same: a period of bloom followed by extremely rapid extinction. The only hope we have is that the non SystemD distros can help Linux survive when the next revolution puts every SystemD distro out of business overnight. That will seriously hurt Linux in the market.

Oh and history shows embracing the right way when the ship is sinking does not work. Tru64 did not save DEC.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Jahta]

There are major distros that are systemd free, and not only because systemd was removed from them, but because they never had it (Slackware)... or at least only have it as a non-required option (Gentoo).

And you have just named both of the "major" systemd free distros. After that you are into niche distros which, while they may each be a decent OS, don't have the support network behind them that the major distros do.

The fun will really start when important application software starts to depend on systemd being there. Being on a systemd free distro is not much consolation if won't work without systemd.

I'm currently on Linux Mint 17 (no systemd), which is LTS until 2019. Hopefully by then, the whole systemd picture (how evil, or not, it really is) will be a lot clearer.

I give Up

[obscuro]

I look at this weird octopus systematically eating every small, unix-like thing about Linux a few bites at a time and I want to scream. But it's just like the Trump/Hillary thing. It's an inevitable march toward the illusion of progress presented by someone who never bothered to pay attention to the structure that underlies real value.

When I get the chance I'll use FreeBSD.... Otherwise, I'll be using my experience of Microsoft in the 90s to navigate the new paradigm of SystemD Linux. Shame on me for thinking there was an escape from hubris.

Here's an idea consistent with the new Linux - how about integrating Facebook's login API into the OS! That way when people load it on their machine they don't have to worry about a new username and password. It will be convenient and people will love that. It seems like a kind of complicated thing though so let's tie it in so deep that taking it out for a server install is a constant battle with each new version. When people complain we'll tell them that they have a choice and can install or uninstall whatever parts of SystemD they want... Because their time is infinite.

Re:and in other news...

[shutdown -p now]

Wait, are you serious? One really can't get past a misbehaving startup service with Ctrl+C (or some other keystroke) when using systemd?

Re:Since '85?!

[Ulric]

No actually old farts are being hired in droves. We're not "snowflakes" in need of constant coddling and stroking. We understand we work to pay our bills and be of service to our employers... Not fulfill our dream selves. Great if our job can be fulfilling, but not really necessary.

So what you're saying is your just old snowflakes?

The word is durable.

Re:Linux is far worse than Microsoft

[Shane_Optima]

That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.