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

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

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday July 15, 2017 @03:34AM from the permissions-please dept.

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."

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You all presumably know why. by QuietLagoon · 2017-07-15 03:47 · Score: 3

I don't know why. Can someone explain? thanks.
1. Re:You all presumably know why. by darkHanzz · 2017-07-15 03:53 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Presumably, this is a poke towards systemD. It has suffered from feature-creep, which directly opposes the unix-philosophy of doing only one thing, but doing it well. Recently, there was a problem with, I believe the DNS server which is part of systemD.
2. Re:You all presumably know why. by TechyImmigrant · 2017-07-15 04:05 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Make no mistake, this is a turf war.
  Who's in charge? The user? The kernel? Ring-0?
  The answer to this is different depending on the topic. The topic here is init and who gets to say what the rlimits are and how. There are lots of other topics - random numbers, filesystems, network attach-detatch, routing etc. For all these things and many more there has been a turf war along the lines of "We will fix this in the kernel!", "Oh no you won't, we will fix this with our daemon", "Oh no you won't, my userland administration tool will fix this".
  This is generally fine, but for each there will be a slashdot thread with many jerks represented.
  
  --
  I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
3. Re:You all presumably know why. by QuietLagoon · 2017-07-15 04:12 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  ...For all these things and many more there has been a turf war along the lines of "We will fix this in the kernel!", "Oh no you won't, we will fix this with our daemon", "Oh no you won't, my userland administration tool will fix this"....
  At that point, the need for an overall system-level architect comes into play. Someone who looks at the overall system, its architecture and design goals and decides the best way to implement features and fixes.
  .
  To this Linux outsider, it seems that systemd was implemented more because someone decided to do it, rather than being done because it was the appropriate solution to a problem.
4. Re:You all presumably know why. by TWX · 2017-07-15 04:50 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  So SystemD is the Emacs of init?
  
  --
  Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
5. Re:You all presumably know why. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-15 04:56 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  sysvinit was decrepit and unsuitable for modern systems,
  This is complete bullshit. My (modern) computer worked perfectly fine before systemd. There was zero improvement after my preferred distro replaced init with systemd. Maybe it booted up 2 seconds faster? I don't know, it's linux, I don't ever fucking reboot it. The only change in my life was how much time I had to spend learning systemd bullshit that added ZERO VALUE to my use of linux on my pc.
  
  So you better get a LOT more specific as to which system was "unsuited" for sysvinit before you start making blanket statements like that or people are going to continue to call you out on your bullshit.
6. Re: You all presumably know why. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-15 05:07 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Don't forget the recent severity 9.8 CVE regarding invalid username handling that Poettering closed as NOTABUG. It's a trainwreck of bad design driven by an egotistic idiot.
7. Re:You all presumably know why. by TWX · 2017-07-15 05:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  That's because in-part design-by-committee ends up with the noisiest, stupidest person on the committee calling the shots, that project ends up catering to the lowest common denominator.
  A large part of why Linux itself is successful is that while there's a lot of input, there's a single point of decision making in the form of Torvalds himself, and he's both smart enough to generally make good choices, and to listen to the debate and weigh the arguments to make a decision.
  Lennart Poettering is no Linus Torvalds. Perhaps something to replace System V and BSD inits is necessary, but Poettering's work with pulseaudio is itself incomplete; the init system is far too important to trust to him when his sound daemon, a relatively small but important piece of the desktop system, isn't really finished to a polished state.
  Besides, with the advent of the VM model for hosting and "cloud" where VMs are created and destroyed on an as-needed basis and automatically, stripping down the init process to the bare-minimum needed for a VM and using some kind of staging system to spawn the right conditions in the VM init process is probably more important than some all-knowing, all-seeing system that seems more tailored toward long-running, general-purpose computing anyway. The problem that SystemD solves isn't the new problem, it's the old one.
  
  --
  Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
8. Re:You all presumably know why. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-15 05:19 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  And yet that part isn't 100% separate... it cannot operate on its own, it requires libsystemd -> it isn't separate. While it is true it is mostly unused it is a gross misrepresentation to say it is 100% separate.
  Systemd is a poorly thought out concept.. Half of the feature-creep is because of a lack of understanding and the other half due to NIH.
  The recent "username starting with a number" bullshit is clear proof of that... username start with a number & wanting a unitfile executed as said user ? TOBAD... executing as ROOT... Systemd still hasn't resolved this & their preferred solution right now is redefine what a valid user is ... sure starting with a number is bad BUT blocking a "." in the name... that SMB and AD issues right there...
  Or what about the rapid polling of getpid() ?
  its a flawed concept
9. Re:You all presumably know why. by TWX · 2017-07-15 05:20 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  So what editor do you use?
  
  --
  Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
10. Re:You all presumably know why. by bferrell · 2017-07-15 05:25 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
11. Re:You all presumably know why. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-15 05:55 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  No. The problems in systemd were closed because the maintainer didn't like people pointing out that his design is shit.
12. Re:You all presumably know why. by Megol · 2017-07-15 06:00 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  ...For all these things and many more there has been a turf war along the lines of "We will fix this in the kernel!", "Oh no you won't, we will fix this with our daemon", "Oh no you won't, my userland administration tool will fix this"....
  At that point, the need for an overall system-level architect comes into play. Someone who looks at the overall system, its architecture and design goals and decides the best way to implement features and fixes.
  .
  To this Linux outsider, it seems that systemd was implemented more because someone decided to do it, rather than being done because it was the appropriate solution to a problem.
  Unlike most complainers (some that simply doesn't understand systemd at all) systemd solves a number of real world problems created by the disconnect of how computers used to be used (let's call it "static" configuration) and how a system is used today (... "dynamic" configuration).
  If systemd is so bloated, reinvents the whole of Linux, is a Microsoft conspiracy etc. why is that it actually solves (most) problems with older init systems? Why is it modern Unix systems have similar "dynamic" init systems rather than the old? Why is it nobody else actually created a modern init system that can be used for the same things as systemd but "follows the Unix philosophy"*?
  In a was systemd is kind of a hack - but that is because it tries to integrate into the Unix design and allow it to do things it wasn't designed to do. In some cases maybe systemd have to much of hack in it but again: where is the alternative?
  Note: I don't really like systemd.
  (* I strongly maintain that people taking about 1) doing one thing well being a Unix thing rather than a design thing 2) thinking that philosophy is actually applied to modern Unix systems are seriously confused)
13. Re: You all presumably know why. by DeHackEd · 2017-07-15 06:30 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  No, logs are preserved by shipping them off to another system over the network. Binary logs are harder to forge, but not impossible. Faking wtmp entries is a thing, for example.
14. Re: You all presumably know why. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-15 07:10 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The username starts with a zero thing where closed days ago.
  Why the fuck should an init system even CARE what the user name is?
  Why the fuck did that init system reinvent user handling that the OS was ALREADY doing?
  Why the FUCK does systemd have it's own fucking DNS implementation?!?!
  Calling systemd SHIT is an insult to every piece of excrement, feces, turd, and dung that will ever be egested in the entire past and future history of this and every other fucking universe.
15. Re: You all presumably know why. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-15 07:15 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  you are one of those special idiots my mother warned me about... EWONTFIX/Closed is NOT fixing...
  Updating manuals to (now) state that systemd only accepts usernames adhering to: [a-z_][a-z0-9_-]*$? is not a fix.
  Systemd hasn't fixed teh issue, they man paged what it doesn't like. someone creating a username starting with a 0 will still get executed as root. Even worse!!! a username with a "." in it will also do it... Periods have been permitted for ages (just not starting...) and this means if a linux machine is part of an AD it could cause issues...
  https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2017-July/039237.html
  > 1. We do not permit empty usernames
  > 2. We don't permit the first character to be numeric
  > (This also filters out fully numeric user names)
  > 3. We do not permit dots in usernames, neither at the beginning nor in
  > the middle.
  > 4. We do not permit "-" at the beginning of usernames (something which
  > POSIX explicitly suggests, btw)
  > 5. We require that the user name fits in the utmp user name field, so
  > that we can always log properly about it.
16. Re: You all presumably know why. by KiloByte · 2017-07-15 08:41 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  There are so many ways to add an username Poettering won't like. The majority of programs for creating new accounts (except for adduser). Samba+AD, as you said. LDAP. Any random "pull authentication from a database" script. Using an editor on /etc/passwd. Etc.
  POSIX defines a minimal set that must be supported, and systemd fails to handle even that.
  But this is not the damning part -- every piece of software can have bugs, any non-trivial piece of software has bugs. This is natural. What's totally, utterly unacceptable, is responding to an obvious, critical bug, that also contradict the standard without providing a rationale, with a WONTFIX.
  On a shit package that applies rainbow colors to a line of text, this would be grounds for immediate purging.
  On something that wants to replace init+rc+mount+pm-utils+DNS+lxc+about everything else, it's grounds for nuking an entire distribution from the orbit.
  
  --
  The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
17. Re:You all presumably know why. by amorsen · 2017-07-15 09:00 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Mod parent up...
  Classical init was made to handle monitoring of services, making sure they get restarted if they fail but not over and over if they keep failing. This was done with inittab.
  Unfortunately inittab because too limiting, especially when it came to starting order and dependencies, and so everyone abandoned it, replacing it with a bunch of shell scripts, different depending on distribution and Unix variant. Alas, the process monitoring was lost in that change, so everyone had to run stuff like monit and write a bunch more scripts.
  SystemD brings proper daemon monitoring back, on steroids. It does away with stupid PID files and it handles dependencies very very well. It is an enormous leap forwards.
  Alas, it also decided to solve a bunch of non-problems like logs and DNS resolution and file system mounting. Problems that already had really well tested solutions that could be relied on to never break.
  (Yes, snatching STDERR from a daemon is genius. Definitely. But what was wrong with then handing the output to the syslog daemon?)
  
  --
  Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
18. Re: You all presumably know why. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-15 09:09 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  There is a reason why all the major distributions use [systemd]
  Indeed; its author campaigned to get it into every major DE and distribution, starting with a proposal to have GNOME depend on logind. [1] He later congratulated trolls who pushed it on debian-devel [2], publicly, on Google+. [3] Later, he moved to force udev to depend on kdbus (and thus systemd; though that was thwarted by LKML), adding "Gentoo, this is your wake-up call." [4] Now, what type of developer treats his fellow FOSS members like that? I'll tell you: someone looking for a fight.
  No legitimate libre software project needs to be pushed to gain adoption. Perhaps you should read more about Lennart's original goals, such as "gently pushing everyone to use the same standard base". [ https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-June/152672.html ] This attempt to "standardize" was little more than building a solution and *then* finding problems to fix with it. In short, it was politically-motivated. It's a big part of why, predictably, it has become a Gordian knot of "modular" components. Moving away from systemd 10, 15, 20 years from now will be a nightmare; I bet they haven't thought about that, though! By keeping components 100% divorced from each other, a proper *nix system can swap components out in just about any order or combination. Those who've invested too much into systemd will need to find a replacement for each systemd "module" they actively use if they're going to get away from it. It's the classic all-in-one software architecture that looks easy to adopt, but proves extremely painful to move away from. Do you think that was by accident? If so, I've got swamp land in Arizona for sale.
  If it was as you say, there wouldn't have been a big upset over its adoption. If what you said was true, literally every distro would use it and it would have little to no flaws. A big part of what people dislike about systemd is its culture, both users and developers. Before you fire out that "only technical discussion plz" bullshit, take a look at other projects. Would you want to be part of any of them if they had a shit culture? If they arbitrarily closed bugs, assuming their software is perfect? Social merit is just as relevant as technical merit; without both, you won't get users and your community will die, which will lead to bitrot and eventually, software death. Consider that the reason most people use systemd is a) distros were "gently pushed" to use it and b) most users don't pay much attention to init. With those two facts in mind, how can anyone say systemd earned that position? It was marketed and pushed, plain as day. Your willful ignorance does not contradict it.
  Now that systemd architectural flaws are showing their faces (as others have predicted), the rabble are scrambling to defend the poor technical choices made by the systemd team. The biggest supporters of systemd (Arch Linux devs in particular) lied -- yes, lied -- to their users about their plans for systemd. [5] One such developer was rewarded for their duplicity with a spot on the systemd dev team: Mr. Tom Gunderson, who I've had the displeasure of communicating with personally. Even one of his fellow devs was pissed he was spreading false information: [6]
  At what point will you and others realize that the systemd team is socially manipulative and does not appreciate others finding holes in their software? How many other teams would dismiss as NOTABUG or WONTFIX, like the recent '0day' username bug? They are not good libre software citizens and are hardly worth the bits their code is stored on. The Bazaar has little use for an Ivory Tower.
  Perhaps you should read up on the history yourself before proclaiming others are full of shit.
  [1]: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-May/msg00427.html
  [2]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/11/msg00350.html
  [3]: https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/jcCjMct3SJ3 (See Lennart's Dec 19th commen
19. Re:You all presumably know why. by dbIII · 2017-07-15 16:17 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I mean the systemd project itself may be shit, but for some reason all the technical maintainers of distros who have nothing to do with systemd think the opposite.
  They want gnome and systemd is the price.
20. Re: You all presumably know why. by dbIII · 2017-07-15 21:20 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  The project is a massive "cathedral" instead of modular pieces - planned for that reason or not a fork would be more difficult than devising a total replacement structured differently.
21. Re:You all presumably know why. by segedunum · 2017-07-16 05:06 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  The only sad part is, if everyone here used all the energy they have to hate on SystemD, to actually fix those bugs, we wouldn't be having these discussions about how buggy it is.
  Anyone who has tried has had issues waved away as someone else's problem. This also does not resolve the maintainer or responsibility, a notion which is just downright hilarious.
Eventually systemd will replace the kernel by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-15 03:52 · Score: 5, Funny

Linus knows his time is short
Repent, Linus, and maybe systemd will allow your kernel to run as a background process for housekeeping and legacy tasks.
Not very sytemd like by Mostly+a+lurker · 2017-07-15 04:03 · Score: 5, Funny

Surely in the systemd era, we should be deprecating setuid on executables, and replacing it with some kind of systemd api. This provides a much more modern "unified" approach then all that minimalist, modular rubbish that infected the system for so long.
You were warned by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-15 05:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

SystemD is a trainwreck from day one and just keeps on piling more of it. If it were only init, things would've been more than fine. But no. It's a whole project of reinvented crapware that is reinvented BADLY. And distros blindly install more and more from the "project". Like Ubuntu and their idiotic decision to switch to systemd-resolved which was wrought with nothing but trouble, rendered Ubuntu 17.04 dead in the DNS water for a month since its release! I wonder which maintainer got paid to subvert Ubuntu with that.
* networkd assuming dhcp client role, but then not renewing lease (freedesktop bug #82731 -- open for 3 years now!!), among many other issues
* resolved assuming DNS resolver role, but then not being nearly compliant with RFC, among many other issues, some even serious security vulnerabilities
* consoled taking over console, but then someone realized it's a REALLY dumb idea so they scraped it (for now)
* timesyncd assuming ntpd role, but then doing stupid things like defaulting to Google NTP which is NOT a normal NTP service! Asked by google to not do that, responded EWONTFIX (systemd github issues #437), among many other issues ...
In fact, it's even bad at being "just an init". Good luck with those NFS mounts and systemd. Good luck with "A start job is running" when it encounters a trivial situation that every. other. init. can. work. around.
It's a shitshow fueled by arrogance of "we know better than all of you combined", just a quick look in the github issues is sufficient to see this. It's so out of control, that issues found to be 10 on vulnerability scales are closed as not a bug (CVE-2017-1000082).
Every software has bugs, but systemd bugs are closed EWONTFIX because the principal developer has zero clue about modern operating systems. The principal developer of an init for a traditionally server oriented operating system* who, by his own words, never administered servers. And who, by his own words, disables read ahead prefetch because "systemd developers all run laptops with SSDs and don't need it"....... !!
It's a sinking ship, rats are fleeing, and more and more professionals are getting SICK of it. You were warned, you laughed, you called us luddites, now enjoy the turd.
*) With a server market share of more than 50% (look up Netcraft monthly stats), and a desktop market share of 1% -- so guess where the priorities are
Systemd: What Does It Solve? by Frosty+Piss · 2017-07-15 07:38 · Score: 4, Interesting

I am not questioning you opinions on systemd, particularly since my father, a retired CE and lifelong *nix user dislikes it with a passion. But I'm way to ignorant of the dirty mechanics and politics of Linux to understand how, with so many presumably knowledgeable folks who dislike systemd, it became a standard in the more popular distros. Does it solve some vexing issue for the maintainers of these distros? What do these people find so compelling as to make such a fundamental change?

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1. Re:Systemd: What Does It Solve? by shoor · 2017-07-15 09:04 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I'm a long time user of Linux, and I've been scratching my head over the question of why are so many distros using systemd if it's so bad also. This has been discussed on slashdot many times. I can remember in the early days of systemd when it came up here on slashdot, a suspiciously methodical bunch of replies to any criticism would crop up, as though someone had been hired to defend it. It was these apparently crafted replies, supposedly designed to win people over, that made me more wary and suspicious than anything else. OK, that doesn't answer the question, it's just some background. All we groundlings know are what people who presumably do know tell us, and we have to decide which explanations have a ring of truth and which smell fishy for some reason. Right now I'm thinking particularly about a slashdot topic from July 3:
  
  'Severe' Systemd Bug Allowed Remote Code Execution For Two Years
  and an anonymous coward earned a score of 5 with a posting that to me had the ring of truth: https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10813029&cid=54733511
  
  --
  In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
2. Re:Systemd: What Does It Solve? by chihowa · 2017-07-15 11:24 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
  
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