In Which Linus Torvalds Makes An 'Init' Joke (lkml.org)

Long-time Slashdot reader jawtheshark writes: In a recent Linux Kernel Mailing List post, Linux Torvalds finishes his mail with a little poke towards a certain init system. It is a very faint criticism, compared to his usual style. While Linus has no direct influence on the "choices" of distro maintainers, his opinion is usually valued.
In a discussion about how to set rlimit default values for setuid execs, Linus concluded his email by writing, "And yes, a large part of this may be that I no longer feel like I can trust "init" to do the sane thing. You all presumably know why."

Comments

Re:You all presumably know why.

[bferrell]

I quote myself...

More pointedly, systemD has recently been found declareing usernames that are considered valid by the system at large and by POSIX standards, to be invalid and selecting a new userid at random (on some very common systems, root) and silently running processes under that user id.

This is an EXTREMELY non-standard behavior and as such, unexpected by the user community at large. By many, it is considered a security breech. Based on the comment from Linus, I suspect he does not consider this to be sane behavior.

The systemD developer community has demonstrated reluctance to correct this observed behavior.

This isn't "change is scary". This is, the damned thing is broken and the developers went into Pewee Herman mode (I meant to do that! I won't fix it).

THAT is scary. The rude and dismissive attitude around the cult of SystemD is even more scary.

Re:Systemd: What Does It Solve?

[chihowa]

It's a trojan horse story.

Maintaining unit files seemed easier than maintaining sysvinit scripts, so the distro maintainers liked it (along with a couple of other init replacement contenders). It's also shiny and new and backed by RedHat.

There was feature creep and capricious architectural design before most distros picked it up, but perhaps people didn't think that it would keep getting worse and worse. Now the project encroaches on more and more system roles and doesn't play well with the existing tools.