A Look at Facebook's Use of Systemd (phoronix.com)

At an event this month (you can find the video of it here), Davide Cavalca, a production engineer at Facebook, spoke about the growing adoption of systemd at the data centers of the company. From a report: Facebook continues making use of systemd's many features inside their data centers. Some of their highlights for systemd use in 2018 includes: Facebook's servers have been relying on systemd for about the past two years. Facebook is using CentOS 7 everywhere from hosts to containers. While relying on CentOS 7, Facebook backports a lot of packages including new systemd releases, Meson, other dependencies, and of course new Linux kernel releases. Facebook is working on "pystemd" as a Python (Cython) wrapper on top of SD-BUS.

Comments

Re:Only one good use-case

[DCFusor]

What order, I did an NFS mount in /etc/fstab, which is the documented way that worked for years, and not only did systemd fail to mount it, it failed to respect the bg (backgrounding try again) flag, and then refused to let the system shut down since it couldn't unmount what it had failed to mount - which I verified by mounting manally at the CLI - and then it would unmount it and shutdown normally.
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There was no fine manual to read that I'm aware of when this happened. Just oddball notes all over if you googled about how to fix just this particular bug - which workarounds worked until the next update. You might not have been paying attention.
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Got my system in such a state? What a jerk, you're proving my point. Systemd got it into that state, I did zero, nada, nothing but allow an update to happen.
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I don't have an employment contract - I work for my own outfit, which is a physics lab. It needs a lot of fairly custom machines from little to huge and fast for data aq and control - which is needed as the fusion reactor I'm developing works well enough to make too many neutrons to be safe near....
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If it wasn't a bug that affected a lot of people, why did they complain and get the snotty remark - and then list workarounds findable on google?
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That lovely restart loop on slow starting things is well documented as well, and has a workaround involving setting a longer timeout, which is a nasty hack...
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Pretty sure it's not ignorant to trust "security" updates. I wouldn't have known systemd existed, much less have had time to retrain on hard to find or nonexistent documents that were changing daily...I'm REAL sure that something they broke isn't my fault, and people who tell me otherwise might be the problem.

Re:systemd has logged your complaint

[DCFusor]

Yeah, you're one of the ones who can't even, that's obvious. When this crap just gets added to your system, how are you even supposed to know there's such a thing as journalctl? Some of us, do, you know, real work on this stuff, and only do sysadmin if it's required to set something nifty up. Having to also fix things someone else broke is extra work that isn't needed. The pushback isn't for no reason - systemd really screwed up a lot of people's day. If it just worked...probably would have been another story, despite the terrible architecture.