Systemd as tragedy [LWN.net]

Systemd as tragedy

Posted Feb 2, 2019 1:10 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: Systemd as tragedy by rgmoore
Parent article: Systemd as tragedy

> It would be easier to believe that RedHat was ignoring Upstart if they hadn't adopted it as their init system for RHEL 6. Fedora also used it starting with Fedora 9

Indeed. Red Hat developers involved in Fedora looked at either developing a new system or existing alternatives to sysvinit and choose Upstart

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FCNewInit

Red Hat specifially moved to using Upstart in RHEL 6 and had no corporate plan to move away from it. Lennart developed Systemd on his own time (despite discouragement from his manager precisely because RHEL 6 had committed to Upstart already) originally after discussing with Scott, the primary developer of Upstart and it is likely that if Canonical had given up on its insistence on a CLA that Upstart would have been morphed into adopting many of the ideas from Systemd (which themselves were heavily based on Launchd)

Red Hat atleast at that time was heavily developer driven. There was no corporate plan to diss Canonical or anything like that. On the contrary, there was prominent Red Hat contributors running Debian and even contributing to them and several of the major JBoss contributors were big Ubuntu users/fans etc. Development for the enterprise releases at that time was surprisingly loosely organized ( Fun fact: RHEL 6 was originally planning to ship both up2date and yum until I argued in the mailing list fairly last minute that it was pointless to do so and won that debate by merely posting to corresponding os development list in the last minute) and the resulting quality was often driven by passionate heroic developers. Judging by the external signs, even in Fedora, things have better a lot more organized and more process driven but anyone thinking that systemd was somehow corporate driven is just simply mistaken.

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Systemd as tragedy

Posted Feb 4, 2019 19:15 UTC (Mon) by jccleaver (guest, #127418) [Link] (4 responses)

> Red Hat specifially moved to using Upstart in RHEL 6 and had no corporate plan to move away from it.

And it's worth reiterating for folks that RHEL 6's Upstart implementation was mostly identical to the previous (traditional) init implementation, at least for anything that most admins had to deal with on a regular basis. (You could go your entire deployment without having to care how getty was started in early boot, for example, and no one was using /etc/inittab for starting things directly by that point anyway.)

Hard to say if a RHEL7 w/o systemd would have tried to move towards using more of upstart's dynamic features, but I doubt too much change ever would be done in RHEL6 when the static SysV-based method worked fine enough. Those that needed dynamic or monitored service management knew how to hook those *into* a SysV framework, which is why the PID1 vs PID2 debate now is so salient.

Systemd as tragedy

Posted Feb 5, 2019 22:08 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (3 responses)

FYI there has not ever been any real upstart integration in any distribution nor upstream with the exception of Chrome/Chromium OS and thats just because Scott did it himself.

So the only person that could truly compare and criticize systemd from upstart perspective is the same man that wrote it and recommended that another init system would written as opposed to his being fixed ( hence systemd got bourne )...

So people can contemplate that *fact" while they continue to riding wishfull thinking pony's in circle, throwing not rocks but bricks in the glass house while worshipping the shell god's and chanting rhymes about glorious sysV, openRC and whatnot.

Bottom line systemd can be critize by many things ( and arguably justly so ) but none of which it has been critizised for in this thread.

Comparing legacy shell script based init systems with systemd is comparing apples to oranges...

Systemd as tragedy

Posted Feb 6, 2019 0:16 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Comparing legacy shell script based init systems with systemd is comparing apples to oranges...

The main advantage of systemd is that it actually exists today. Over and over again we hear a lot about how System-V init or for that matter OpenRC, with just a few bits and pieces added to them, could be far better than systemd, but nobody seems to be prepared to do the drudge work to actually prove this by demonstration.

IOW, one Lennart Poettering who actually releases working code is better than ten people who complain about how bad systemd is, and fantasise about the great code somebody (not them) could write that would make init system XYZ obviously superior to systemd.

Systemd as tragedy

Posted Feb 6, 2019 23:28 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

I'm waiting to see what the bsd communities come up with since they need an service manager along with an ipc to keep themselves relevant in today's age.

I might drop by at the next bsd con to see where they are at with this as in if they have realized they need an service manager ( solaris came up with smf what 10 or tweenty years ago ) and if so are discussing what they can learn from systemd and adapt to their own service manager and what they are going to leave out from systemd or if they are still in denial.

Systemd as tragedy

Posted Feb 11, 2019 22:55 UTC (Mon) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

Maemo / MeeGo did have extensive Upstart setup.