1. If you even suggest for a second that systemd isn't awesome, you will hear from people (for example.... you) who says it's great, without addressing any concerns that system admins actually have.
Mainly because said concerns tend to boil down to "Waaah, it's different." Oh no.
2. The command line interface is annoying... it's even worse than the problems we have with SMF on Solaris 10+. Following the original threads about it, you can tell Lennart has no idea what people actually do with the command line. systemd calling $MORE? Hasn't anyone ever used expect?
"Annoying" is an opinion. Could you please link to said threads?
3. They want to roll cron and inetd into it... for no reason that I can see. Vixie cron and xinetd both work great last I checked. This seems to be bacause that's what MacOS X does with launchd, not for any real reason.
There are some advantages, such as per job/per request cgroups to make sure that all processes get cleaned up correctly. I'm not particularly bothered either way. Note that "in systemd" doesn't mean "in PID 1".
4. Doesn't socket activation require changes to daemons?
It does. However, you don't need to use socket activation -- "classic" forking services can be used just fine. Obviously, yes, if you want all the advantages of systemd, daemons do need to be modified to receive their sockets from systemd.
5. D-Bus dependency. On my init system. Sounds awesome, where do I sign up. systemctl actually didn't work at first on my F15 box because... I don't run dbus (standard X11 window manager, I don't generally use Gnome or KDE, lucky me.)
Some sort of RPC was needed for communication between systemctl and PID 1. TBH I would rather systemd used a solution that's already widely used in the Linux desktop, is well-maintained and robust, rather than Lennart rolling his own NIH version. But maybe that's just me. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable design decision to me. What solution would you prefer?
6. Optimizing for a problem most Linux boxes don't have... reboot speed and dependency resolution, which really sounds like something I do as little as possible. I run 100s or 1000s of boxes... reboot speed is rarely my concern... my boxes spend more time in POST then they do mounting filesystems and starting sshd these days. Sounds like a laptop problem to me.
As far as I can tell, systemd is also optimised for ensuring that login sessions and daemon processes are correctly & fully cleaned up (for example, if you're rebooting apache, systemd will make sure all the processes apache forked are terminated -- something SysV init can't do).
7. No separate/usr... and when you ask about it you're told "you don't want that." Now, I don't ever separate/usr if I don't have to, but I do not think that is an adequate answer, and I know people this is going to seriously affect at some point.
Before PulseAudio it wasn't possible to turn on a bluetooth headset and have any audio that was playing through your speakers automatically start going to the headset instead.
And that was a fundamental design flaw in Alsa (rather than just missing drivers), and it could only be remedied by inventing a whole new sound daemon / system and putting it on top of Alsa?
What does PulseAudio-on-ALSA accomplish that straight ALSA cannot? Assuming a non-null answer to that, how many users really need that functionality to justify including PulseAudio as the default configuration for major distributions?
At the risk of repeating myself:
Plug in USB speakers and have audio come out
Individually control applications' volume/balance/output channel
For my friends who use Linux, the first thing I do whenever a new distro is installed is to check if it is using PulseAudio. If so, I remove it and replace it with ALSA. Suddenly issues related to audio playback go away and everything just magically works. Oh and they easily have a proper mixer without jumping through hoops, too, which is handy considering some of them are using 5.1 surround sound and/or bluetooth headphones.
So, tell me. How, using ALSA, do you turn on a pair of BT headphones and redirect sound from running apps to them?
I too had problems with PA when it was initially introduced, but now I haven't had any problems with it in literally years. These days it Just Works, and I've used some of its nifty features from time to time. To claim that it doesn't solve any relevant problems or that raw ALSA should be the default is completely bogus, TBH.
If ALSA were a barely-functional, poorly designed sound system...
I'm not in a position to try it myself because the PC on which I'm typing this has integrated graphics, which isn't enough to run KDE according to some idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Fixed that for you. KDE 4 works perfectly with integrated graphics, you just have to turn desktop effects off. It's perfectly usable without desktop effects enabled, all applications detect it and degrade gracefully, and all the controls etc. work pretty much the same. I have a laptop with integrated graphics that doesn't support desktop effects, and I don't notice the difference apart from once a week or so when I suddenly wonder why my terminal emulator doesn't have a transparent background.
This graceful degradation is a pleasant contrast to GNOME 3, I might add.
Seriously, friend. Can you tell me what a "pam stack" is? I'm having trouble understanding the google results. I'm half a moron, so if you could be gentle, I'd appreciate it.
I must have missed where I claimed there had been any. I was talking about deaths per energy generated, where nuclear fission beats wind quite comfortably. Deaths per TW/hr: wind 0.15, nuclear 0.0009. I can even provide citations:
D.J. Ball, L.E.J. Roberts,
and A.C.D. Simpson "An Analysis of Electricity Generation Health Risks: A United Kingdom Perspective." Centre for Environmental and Risk Management, School of Environmental Sciences,
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK (1994).
That's because the studies aren't sensitive enough and don't include sufficient population. Chernobyl basically affected a few hundred million people all over Europe. Are these studies sensitive enough to pick up small increases in cancer rates, e.g. a dozen additional cases per year in a population of half a billion people? I don't think so.
You're right, they're not sensitive enough. They can't be. The problem is that such levels are well below the noise threshold in background radiation, let alone variations in exposure to other carcinogens. For example, naturally-occurring radon emissions cause more than 20,000 lung cancer deaths a year in the USA.
If you are scared of nuclear fission power generation, you should be terrified of getting out of bed in the morning.
Wouldn't it be better to not build nuclear plants in earthquake prone areas?
Good idea. I'll let you go tell the Japanese that they have to dismantle their entire economy and cut their population by 25% because they're not allowed to have electricity any more.
34.5% of Japan's energy comes from nuclear reactors. 21st century Japan would be an entirely different country without nuclear power. Or perhaps you think they should be burning dinosaurs for their power?
Hydroelectric power disasters have killed two orders of magnitude more people than all of the nuclear "disasters" in history.
Hydroelectric power disasters stop killing people a few days after the disaster. Nuclear power disasters just keep on killing for centuries or longer.
[Citation needed]. Seeing as it's considerably less than a century since the first "nuclear disaster", I think your assertion requires substantiation. Let's consider the worst three nuclear incidents in history. Firstly, Windscale:
A 2010 study of workers directly involved in the cleanup -- and thus expected to have seen the highest exposure rates -- found no significant long term health effects from their involvement.
Or Three Mile Island:
A variety of studies have been unable to conclude that the accident had substantial health effects.
Or perhaps even Chernobyl:
Apart from [57 direct deaths and about 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer], there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident.
I find no evidence that these "disasters just keep on killing." Let's compare that to the Banqiao Dam failure: 26,000 immediate deaths and 145,000 from epidemics. By itself, that incident dwarfs all actual deaths and all projected deaths from all nuclear power disasters in history. I guarantee you will not find a power generation source currently in use that has a better safety record in deaths/TWhr than nuclear power.
And they do have their own cooling, as well as battery backup for cooling. In the case of many of these failed reactors, the battery backup was in the basement, where it was flooded. If only there was some technology that could have saved the day, like not putting batteries in the basement below sea level. Someday...
To be precise: the backup pumps were powered by electricity from the local grid. If that failed (i.e. if all the reactors were shutdown) it could use power from other power stations along the coast. If that failed (i.e. the lines were cut by an earthquake) it could use local diesel generators. If those failed (i.e. because the tsunami was 10m high rather than the 5.7m that the flood defences were designed for) it could use batteries. The batteries worked fine, and kept the reactors cool for 8 hours until they ran flat. That's when the problems started.
RIght now the statistics are very bad, 500 plants in the world, 4-5 major disasters in 50 years, and dozens of near misses, 100s of serious mishaps. You can come up with better systems, but the inherent problems are fundamental and aren't going away.
Um. Can I just point out right now that both hydro and wind power are much more dangerous? Hydroelectric power disasters have killed two orders of magnitude more people than all of the nuclear "disasters" in history. What power supply solution would you support? Burning dinosaurs?
Yeah, that's been bugging me for quite a while now. They have steam-turbines and generators, and a fuckload of steam. What's the problem?
Suppose you have a 100-tonne steam turbine running at 20000 RPM, and you fail to stop it before an earthquake grabs it and gives it a good hard shake. Your turbine hall is likely to literally explode, and foot-long aluminium turbine blades travelling at hundreds of metres per second will trash the entire place, including your high-pressure steam pipes. These turbines are huge
As I understand it, in the first fraction of a second of the earthquake, and at the same time as the reactor was SCRAMed, the turbines at Fukushima were crash-stopped and pressure release valves dumped the steam pressure in the turbine feed (probably to the torus). This was to protect the equipment from the earthquake.
So, they have steam turbines and generators (which have been emergency stopped and require a fairly tedious recommissioning to ensure that the bearings and drive shaft alignment haven't been damaged by that or the earthquake), and considerably less steam being generated than would be being generated while the reactor is running normally, and possibly an already-lowered coolant level due to emergency steam quenching.
For example spontaneous volcanism, 1000 tonne meteor strike.
With a 1000 tonne meteor strike we'd have more to worry about than a little bit of radioactive material. Like the trifling matter of the global nuclear winter, for example.
Why does everybody talk shit about the French? Their military history is ancient, they were the British empire's primary enemy, and without them America would probably have been crushed during the revolution.
Sorry, Slashdot's HTML parser doesn't allow the <joke> tag.
I'm genuinely pleased to see so many European nations working together on this, including the French. I am a little concerned about Sarkozy's grandstanding, but truth be told, the UN resolution couldn't have been obtained without the French, and as far as I can tell, France (not the UK or USA) is the linchpin of the military coalition that's being assembled.
Perhaps then the problem is that we never hear about this in the news stories.
In the UK, at least, the government have been very careful to highlight the broad international consensus for and involvement in the action against Gaddafi, and the media here also seem to have been emphasising the cooperation from other countries.
However, it's only natural that people want to hear how their country is helping out, so there have also been quite a lot of interest stories on the news here about the particular British units that are involved.
You do know that this group terrorize and sends death threats to underage girls?
yeah, a bunch of wonderful people~
Even I know that describing Anonymous as a "group" completely misses the point that Anonymous is comprised of people of many nebulous, amorphous and ever-changing affiliations, any two of whom are at any time are likely to be working at cross-purposes or do utterly contradictory things.
You -- and everyone else, in particular politicians and media organisations -- appear to be determined to put a face on something that by definition has none.
So yes. Some of the [people who DDoS VISA and Paypal] may also be [people who send death threats to underage girls]. In fact, that's probably a given. But to say that those groups of people are one and the same because they happen to be comprised of people who self-identify as anonymous Internet users is disingenuous at best.
Slashdot Mirror
1. If you even suggest for a second that systemd isn't awesome, you will hear from people (for example.... you) who says it's great, without addressing any concerns that system admins actually have.
Mainly because said concerns tend to boil down to "Waaah, it's different." Oh no.
2. The command line interface is annoying... it's even worse than the problems we have with SMF on Solaris 10+. Following the original threads about it, you can tell Lennart has no idea what people actually do with the command line. systemd calling $MORE? Hasn't anyone ever used expect?
"Annoying" is an opinion. Could you please link to said threads?
3. They want to roll cron and inetd into it... for no reason that I can see. Vixie cron and xinetd both work great last I checked. This seems to be bacause that's what MacOS X does with launchd, not for any real reason.
There are some advantages, such as per job/per request cgroups to make sure that all processes get cleaned up correctly. I'm not particularly bothered either way. Note that "in systemd" doesn't mean "in PID 1".
4. Doesn't socket activation require changes to daemons?
It does. However, you don't need to use socket activation -- "classic" forking services can be used just fine. Obviously, yes, if you want all the advantages of systemd, daemons do need to be modified to receive their sockets from systemd.
5. D-Bus dependency. On my init system. Sounds awesome, where do I sign up. systemctl actually didn't work at first on my F15 box because... I don't run dbus (standard X11 window manager, I don't generally use Gnome or KDE, lucky me.)
Some sort of RPC was needed for communication between systemctl and PID 1. TBH I would rather systemd used a solution that's already widely used in the Linux desktop, is well-maintained and robust, rather than Lennart rolling his own NIH version. But maybe that's just me. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable design decision to me. What solution would you prefer?
6. Optimizing for a problem most Linux boxes don't have... reboot speed and dependency resolution, which really sounds like something I do as little as possible. I run 100s or 1000s of boxes... reboot speed is rarely my concern... my boxes spend more time in POST then they do mounting filesystems and starting sshd these days. Sounds like a laptop problem to me.
As far as I can tell, systemd is also optimised for ensuring that login sessions and daemon processes are correctly & fully cleaned up (for example, if you're rebooting apache, systemd will make sure all the processes apache forked are terminated -- something SysV init can't do).
7. No separate /usr... and when you ask about it you're told "you don't want that." Now, I don't ever separate /usr if I don't have to, but I do not think that is an adequate answer, and I know people this is going to seriously affect at some point.
"systemd itself is actually completely fine with /usr on a separate file system that is not pre-mounted at boot time. However, the common basic set of OS components of modern Linux machines is not, and has not been in quite some time. And it is unlikely that this is going to be fixed any time soon, or even ever." People seem to be very keen to shoot the messenger (i.e. the systemd devs) for warning them that about breakage that has been present since before systemd existed.
Gah, I don't even run systemd myself and I seem to know more about it than most people commenting on this article...
Before PulseAudio it wasn't possible to turn on a bluetooth headset and have any audio that was playing through your speakers automatically start going to the headset instead.
And that was a fundamental design flaw in Alsa (rather than just missing drivers), and it could only be remedied by inventing a whole new sound daemon / system and putting it on top of Alsa?
In a word, yes.
systemd is fine. Out of interest, what exactly is your problem with it, other than it's not SysV init?
What does PulseAudio-on-ALSA accomplish that straight ALSA cannot? Assuming a non-null answer to that, how many users really need that functionality to justify including PulseAudio as the default configuration for major distributions?
At the risk of repeating myself:
For my friends who use Linux, the first thing I do whenever a new distro is installed is to check if it is using PulseAudio. If so, I remove it and replace it with ALSA. Suddenly issues related to audio playback go away and everything just magically works. Oh and they easily have a proper mixer without jumping through hoops, too, which is handy considering some of them are using 5.1 surround sound and/or bluetooth headphones.
So, tell me. How, using ALSA, do you turn on a pair of BT headphones and redirect sound from running apps to them?
I too had problems with PA when it was initially introduced, but now I haven't had any problems with it in literally years. These days it Just Works, and I've used some of its nifty features from time to time. To claim that it doesn't solve any relevant problems or that raw ALSA should be the default is completely bogus, TBH.
If ALSA were a barely-functional, poorly designed sound system...
It is.
cgroups -> jails
What on earth are you talking about? They have completely different aims and functionality!
How do you get a spacex dragon to Mars orbit in the first place?
Using the (collosal) SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. I know that R'ing TFM is not fashionable here, but seriously...
Oh, and I also use Okular on Windows. It works quite nicely.
I'm not in a position to try it myself because the PC on which I'm typing this has integrated graphics, which isn't enough to run KDE according to some idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Fixed that for you. KDE 4 works perfectly with integrated graphics, you just have to turn desktop effects off. It's perfectly usable without desktop effects enabled, all applications detect it and degrade gracefully, and all the controls etc. work pretty much the same. I have a laptop with integrated graphics that doesn't support desktop effects, and I don't notice the difference apart from once a week or so when I suddenly wonder why my terminal emulator doesn't have a transparent background.
This graceful degradation is a pleasant contrast to GNOME 3, I might add.
Yep, that seems to be the plan. Talk about killing the goose that lays golden eggs!
Seriously, friend. Can you tell me what a "pam stack" is? I'm having trouble understanding the google results. I'm half a moron, so if you could be gentle, I'd appreciate it.
PAM is the Pluggable Authentication Modules system.
Wind power disasters?
I must have missed where I claimed there had been any. I was talking about deaths per energy generated, where nuclear fission beats wind quite comfortably. Deaths per TW/hr: wind 0.15, nuclear 0.0009. I can even provide citations:
D.J. Ball, L.E.J. Roberts, and A.C.D. Simpson "An Analysis of Electricity Generation Health Risks: A United Kingdom Perspective." Centre for Environmental and Risk Management, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK (1994).
That's because the studies aren't sensitive enough and don't include sufficient population. Chernobyl basically affected a few hundred million people all over Europe. Are these studies sensitive enough to pick up small increases in cancer rates, e.g. a dozen additional cases per year in a population of half a billion people? I don't think so.
You're right, they're not sensitive enough. They can't be. The problem is that such levels are well below the noise threshold in background radiation, let alone variations in exposure to other carcinogens. For example, naturally-occurring radon emissions cause more than 20,000 lung cancer deaths a year in the USA.
If you are scared of nuclear fission power generation, you should be terrified of getting out of bed in the morning.
Wouldn't it be better to not build nuclear plants in earthquake prone areas?
Good idea. I'll let you go tell the Japanese that they have to dismantle their entire economy and cut their population by 25% because they're not allowed to have electricity any more.
34.5% of Japan's energy comes from nuclear reactors. 21st century Japan would be an entirely different country without nuclear power. Or perhaps you think they should be burning dinosaurs for their power?
Hydroelectric power disasters have killed two orders of magnitude more people than all of the nuclear "disasters" in history.
Hydroelectric power disasters stop killing people a few days after the disaster. Nuclear power disasters just keep on killing for centuries or longer.
[Citation needed]. Seeing as it's considerably less than a century since the first "nuclear disaster", I think your assertion requires substantiation. Let's consider the worst three nuclear incidents in history. Firstly, Windscale:
A 2010 study of workers directly involved in the cleanup -- and thus expected to have seen the highest exposure rates -- found no significant long term health effects from their involvement.
Or Three Mile Island:
A variety of studies have been unable to conclude that the accident had substantial health effects.
Or perhaps even Chernobyl:
Apart from [57 direct deaths and about 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer], there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident.
I find no evidence that these "disasters just keep on killing." Let's compare that to the Banqiao Dam failure: 26,000 immediate deaths and 145,000 from epidemics. By itself, that incident dwarfs all actual deaths and all projected deaths from all nuclear power disasters in history. I guarantee you will not find a power generation source currently in use that has a better safety record in deaths/TWhr than nuclear power.
And they do have their own cooling, as well as battery backup for cooling. In the case of many of these failed reactors, the battery backup was in the basement, where it was flooded. If only there was some technology that could have saved the day, like not putting batteries in the basement below sea level. Someday...
To be precise: the backup pumps were powered by electricity from the local grid. If that failed (i.e. if all the reactors were shutdown) it could use power from other power stations along the coast. If that failed (i.e. the lines were cut by an earthquake) it could use local diesel generators. If those failed (i.e. because the tsunami was 10m high rather than the 5.7m that the flood defences were designed for) it could use batteries. The batteries worked fine, and kept the reactors cool for 8 hours until they ran flat. That's when the problems started.
RIght now the statistics are very bad, 500 plants in the world, 4-5 major disasters in 50 years, and dozens of near misses, 100s of serious mishaps. You can come up with better systems, but the inherent problems are fundamental and aren't going away.
Um. Can I just point out right now that both hydro and wind power are much more dangerous? Hydroelectric power disasters have killed two orders of magnitude more people than all of the nuclear "disasters" in history. What power supply solution would you support? Burning dinosaurs?
Yeah, that's been bugging me for quite a while now. They have steam-turbines and generators, and a fuckload of steam. What's the problem?
Suppose you have a 100-tonne steam turbine running at 20000 RPM, and you fail to stop it before an earthquake grabs it and gives it a good hard shake. Your turbine hall is likely to literally explode, and foot-long aluminium turbine blades travelling at hundreds of metres per second will trash the entire place, including your high-pressure steam pipes. These turbines are huge
As I understand it, in the first fraction of a second of the earthquake, and at the same time as the reactor was SCRAMed, the turbines at Fukushima were crash-stopped and pressure release valves dumped the steam pressure in the turbine feed (probably to the torus). This was to protect the equipment from the earthquake.
So, they have steam turbines and generators (which have been emergency stopped and require a fairly tedious recommissioning to ensure that the bearings and drive shaft alignment haven't been damaged by that or the earthquake), and considerably less steam being generated than would be being generated while the reactor is running normally, and possibly an already-lowered coolant level due to emergency steam quenching.
That's the problem.
For example spontaneous volcanism, 1000 tonne meteor strike.
With a 1000 tonne meteor strike we'd have more to worry about than a little bit of radioactive material. Like the trifling matter of the global nuclear winter, for example.
All of them made in USA......priceless!!
I didn't know that Mirages, Eurofighters and Stormshadow missiles were made in the USA! Oh well, you learn something new every day.
Why does everybody talk shit about the French? Their military history is ancient, they were the British empire's primary enemy, and without them America would probably have been crushed during the revolution.
Sorry, Slashdot's HTML parser doesn't allow the <joke> tag.
I'm genuinely pleased to see so many European nations working together on this, including the French. I am a little concerned about Sarkozy's grandstanding, but truth be told, the UN resolution couldn't have been obtained without the French, and as far as I can tell, France (not the UK or USA) is the linchpin of the military coalition that's being assembled.
Perhaps then the problem is that we never hear about this in the news stories.
In the UK, at least, the government have been very careful to highlight the broad international consensus for and involvement in the action against Gaddafi, and the media here also seem to have been emphasising the cooperation from other countries.
However, it's only natural that people want to hear how their country is helping out, so there have also been quite a lot of interest stories on the news here about the particular British units that are involved.
the rest of the UN nations are doing what exactly to support this?
That's just what I could quickly dredge up from BBC News
My God! Half our country is controlled by Anonymous!!!!1111oneone
Since most politicians seem to be basically doing it for the lulz, that would actually explain a lot.
You do know that this group terrorize and sends death threats to underage girls?
yeah, a bunch of wonderful people~
Even I know that describing Anonymous as a "group" completely misses the point that Anonymous is comprised of people of many nebulous, amorphous and ever-changing affiliations, any two of whom are at any time are likely to be working at cross-purposes or do utterly contradictory things.
You -- and everyone else, in particular politicians and media organisations -- appear to be determined to put a face on something that by definition has none.
So yes. Some of the [people who DDoS VISA and Paypal] may also be [people who send death threats to underage girls]. In fact, that's probably a given. But to say that those groups of people are one and the same because they happen to be comprised of people who self-identify as anonymous Internet users is disingenuous at best.