SystemD Gains New Networking Features 553
jones_supa writes A lot of development work is happening on systemd with just the recent couple of weeks seeing over 200 commits. With the most recent work that has landed, the networkd component has been improved with new features. Among the additions are IP forwarding and masquerading support (patch). This is the minimal support needed and these settings get turned on by default for container network interfaces. Also added was minimal firewall manipulation helpers for systemd's networkd. The firewall manipulation helpers (patch) are used for establishing NAT rules. This support in systemd is provided by libiptc, the library used for communicating with the Linux kernel's Netfilter and changing iptables firewall rulesets. Those wishing to follow systemd development on a daily basis and see what is actually happening under the hood, can keep tabs via the systemd Git viewer.
Fuck Me (Score:5, Interesting)
Christ almighty, this beast is a fucking monster. What's next, a shell and a userland?
Glad I'm heading to FreeBSD. Linux is going down the tubes.
Re: Fuck Me (Score:5, Funny)
Shell and userland? What do you think it is, Emacs?
Re: Fuck Me (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Are you implying either one of them isn't more of an OS than DOS ever was?
Re: Fuck Me (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Fuck Me (Score:4, Informative)
CP/M, which ran on 8-bit Intel and Zilog chips, and was (I think) much of the inspiration for QDOS (that became MS-DOS), had a multiprocessing version called MP/M. I never used it, and never read reviews, but the commands were printed on the CP/M command cheat sheet I bought.
Knowing the power and capabilities of 8-bit processors, I suspect it was less than satisfactory in use.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
First, again, Im not talking about dosshell. I'm referring to the preemptive version of dos that had a limited release years before that, and was promptly buried - so yes, you NEED to follow the link instead of basing it on wrong assumptions. You do NOT "know this stuff cold." I was surprised myself - learn something new every day. And yes, I lived it at that time as well as for a decade before that. So tear it up if you can.
And no, tsrs don't work via timeslicing. They work by an interrupt taking control
Re: Fuck Me (Score:5, Funny)
you would still need a decent text editor.
Re: Fuck Me (Score:5, Funny)
"Couldn't we port Emacs on SystemD and have a complete OS?"
You'd still lack a decent editor.
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They'd first need to add a Quake game emulator to SystemD to make it complete.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Informative)
You might be surprised to find that FreeBSD's jails have their own network-virtualization features too.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure they do. But FreeBSD doesn't have a massive init system intruding itself into every single aspect of the operating system.
Just what the fuck is SystemD supposed to be?
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Informative)
Just what the fuck is SystemD supposed to be?
A services manager, actually. It starts and stops services on the system, and if they go down, it optionally restarts them. The fact that many services need to start when the system starts is somewhat incidental to the purpose of systemD.
On top of the services manager, they've built a lot of services. Here is the video that explains launchD, which is heavily copied by systemD [youtube.com].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahh, so it's ripping off Windows' Service Control Manager, a.k.a. "scum". This will certainly end well.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fuck Me (Score:4, Insightful)
A services manager, actually. It starts and stops services on the system, and if they go down, it optionally restarts them. The fact that many services need to start when the system starts is somewhat incidental to the purpose of systemD.
The task you have described seems like something that could be sanely done outside pid1 without worrying that a defect in its significantly larger-than-average-init codebase could cause the entire system to reboot.
Though I guess some might consider that a feature; at least you know you'll never be running without systemd.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Informative)
Putting it in pid1 is mostly driven by cgroups (the Linux kernel's hierarchical process-grouping/resource-management system). The initial kernel design for cgroups was that it was a shared resources managed via a pseudofilesystem (cgroupfs), but the developers of that subsystem seem to have decided that design was unworkable, and are moving towards a design where there can be exactly one userspace controller of the cgroups system at any given time. That more or less has to also be the process supervisor, or else you can't really do sensible things with tying resource-management to services (and increasingly, containers). And that all has to happen when the system is brought up, too. So either it needs to be in PID1, or it needs to be in several PIDs that are tightly coupled via an IPC mechanism. The systemd designers consider the second design more complex and error-prone. See e.g. here [freedesktop.org], plus a third-party comment here [lwn.net].
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Or the echo chamber could be wrong about PID 1.
Like all great lies, it includes a bit of truth:
1. More lines of code equals more bugs.
2. The systemd project has lots of lines of code.
3. PID 1 must be super reliable or bad things will happen.
So far so good right? Stay tuned for the lie:
4. All of systemd is in PID 1. Therefore systend's PID 1 must be buggy and dangerous.
It's about as right as including Bash's line count in a discussion about sysvinit PID1. But don't take my word for it. Echo on bro.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
They were clearly being sarcastic. Either way, you can decode those binary logs and shoot them as text through a pipe.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:4, Insightful)
They were clearly being sarcastic. Either way, you can decode those binary logs and shoot them as text through a pipe.
Yes, and you can put that manadatory binary data into a mandatory system where the binary logs are punched out as paper tape and then run the paper tape back into a reader when you need them.
Why complicate something when the direct approach has worked well for most people for decades? The more links in the chain, the more work it takes to get at the critical data, the fewer the tools that can work with it and the greater the possibility that critical data can be destroyed or become inaccessible,
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Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Informative)
It's a process supervisor / service management system. Booting the machine isn't really the most difficult job of such a system, just the special case of starting some things on boot. More of the work goes into the non-boot case, and at the moment a lot of interest is in container-based virtualization. The kernel cgroups system provides the basic primitives for building such systems: hierarchical process groups, resource limits, etc., but you need a userspace layer to make it usable, e.g. managing creation/destruction of containers (and their associated networking, resources, etc.). Systemd is the userspace layer.
There are fairly similar approaches in other Unixes, though with pros and cons. Solaris uses SMF, and OSX uses launchd, both of which replaced more old-school shell-script-based systems for similar reasons. FreeBSD has toyed on and off with porting launchd from OSX, but the porting effort stalled. For the moment it relies on a more "DIY" solution where it's up to the sysadmin to maintain a tangle of shells scripts plugging things together, e.g. integrating jail management with resource constraints (RCTL), services, and networking. All the pieces are there, but either you write your own shell scripts to glue them together, or you can use something like cbsd [bsdstore.ru]. That has some pros and cons as well.
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The kernel cgroups system provides the basic primitives for building such systems: hierarchical process groups, resource limits, etc., but you need a userspace layer to make it usable, e.g. managing creation/destruction of containers (and their associated networking, resources, etc.). Systemd is the userspace layer.
But you can literally manage cgroups with a few simple commands. I know none of them because I never do it, but I looked up just how it's done and at least one of my earlier comments here on the dot will give you specifics, if you can find it. Obviously, it was part of a rant against systemd.
There are fairly similar approaches in other Unixes, though with pros and cons. Solaris uses SMF, and OSX uses launchd, both of which replaced more old-school shell-script-based systems for similar reasons
The former of which is hated by all, and the latter of which is hated by most.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure, but it will soon have an email client/server and the ability to publish PDFs.
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Just what the fuck is SystemD supposed to be?
An all in one system management daemon intruding on the init system.
To think of it the other way is to ignore everything about the project including all the project pages and project descriptions. No one who works on systemd considers it an init system. Only Slashdot users do.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:4, Insightful)
I want an init system. I cannot fathom why an init system needs to do IP forwarding and routing.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:4, Interesting)
Upstart has serious, known design flaws that cannot and will not be fixed. It will not be adopted for real technical reasons. Shouting slogans doesn't change the technical issues.
See: http://0pointer.de/blog/projec... [0pointer.de]
SysV is the weird monster that this thing is finally saving me from. You can't force me to keep using that old crap, and you can't force systemd not to replace it for me.
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Take a look at the example at the end of (http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html) as a case of a "solution" to a non-problem, it's something that can be dealt with via env
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Kind of hard to do on Debian.
"apt-get install openrc" is hard???
Why are you trolling? Debian might BE switching to systemd, but it is still optional in Jessie, all the other init systems still work.
Besides systemd is modular, you only need to install the modules you want and need.
Re: Fuck Me (Score:3)
You do realize that systemd supports this seamlessly right? As in, I have customer services I can run on systems by dropping the init script into init.d and it will 'just work'. It'll even work automatically with dependent launches if tiu do your LSB headers right.
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Go back to Lennart and continue to suck up to each other. Stupid hipster.
Oh, and while you're listening, get off my lawn!
Re:Fuck Me (Score:4, Insightful)
GNU's Not Unix though so it makes sense :-)
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Funny)
the fact that systemD integrates itself so closely with my GNU^H^H^HSystemD/Linux as PID 1 with a crapload of bloat (that leads to irrecoverable crashes that are marked as wontfix), is against the unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it good.
Sounds like it does do one thing and one thing well: break systems and cause giant slashdot threads. Oh wait, that's two things. It does need more focus after all.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, you're the idiot, because the fact that systemD integrates itself so closely with my GNU^H^H^HSystemD/Linux as PID 1
The features discussed by this article aren't implemented in a program that runs with a PID of 1.
I wish a different name had been chosen for the project that includes, as one of its components, an init daemon named "systemd"; it probably would have avoided some bad press and confusion.
Perhaps those other components were designed under the assumption that the daemon named "systemd" would start them, tying them to that daemon, so maybe that's the rationale for calling the project "systemd" (or "SystemD").
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, installing SystemD is the trendy thing to do. Criticizing it comes from the learned wisdom of people that have been doing this for a very long time.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Informative)
I try to stay out of the systemd fray... but it goes against the core of UNIX... which is the KISS principle.
Init should start tasks, possibly stick them into jails or containers, and set resource limitations. Having something do everything including the kitchen sink is just asking to get hacked down the road unless millions of dollars are spent on source code audits.
As an IT person, results are important. What does systemd provide that previous mechanisms didn't. Parallel startup? I don't boot servers that often where asynchronous startup of processes is a big issue. Resource limits? Doable with the shell script that gets plopped into /etc/rc.d. I'm just not seeing the benefit, but what I am seeing is a gigantic amount of code which touches the entire system, giving me concerns about security and stability, and there have been a number of articles on /. about systemd, to the point where people are even forking distros just so they don't have to deal with it.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:4, Insightful)
Parallel startup?
And even this is -- in my experience -- terrible on systemd. My admittedly-"old" (2009-era i7 laptop), with systemd, will sit at a (text-only) login screen for 10 seconds or so before it's responsive (type username, hit enter, password displays in cleartext because the "password:" prompt hasn't even shown up). Meanwhile, the disk is whirring away trying to start Postgres, etc. So yeah, you technically got me my login prompt nice and fast, but it's completely useless.
And, like you said, I don't reboot my laptop much (that's what suspend-to-RAM is for...), and my desktop/server just stays on all the time.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Interesting)
Major issue affecting Ubuntu and, as far as I know, all Debian-based systems. The workaround should be simple: allow local account logins right up until TTYs actually become available, regardless of configuration. But, apparently, LDAP isn't considered important, so this has been an issue for as long as Debian has used SystemD and will likely remain so until Debian moves on to something else.
The current "recommended" workaround is a pair of ifup/down scripts that requires LDAP when the interface is up and makes it optional when it interface is down, which is great until your system crashes or you lose power and the "optional" config doesn't get applied. Then, it's time to whip out the recovery media so you can manually change the config and have a bootable system again. Needless to say, I refuse to implement that hack of a fix.
Instead, I ended up leaving LDAP optional, with a single user able to sign in, locally only, who can only su, and a local admin account that can only sudo and su, but can't log in. At least that minimizes the risk of not being able to unilaterally change either user's password across multiple systems in a timely manner; an attacker knowing the password for the user who can log in locally would have to be at the machine, and they still couldn't do anything without also knowing the username and password of the user who can sudo+su. In the end, I guess I get the benefit of being able to log in to said machines even when the LDAP server is unavailable, but it still shouldn't be necessary to implement such workarounds.
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I never had the problem you describe
Good for you? Is your NSS configured to require LDAP (other than the fact that the only local user account with a shell is root)? Otherwise, if NSS will fall back to "files" if LDAP fails, it sounds like your configuration and my workaround are one and the same.
This is BS, I can't even believe Debian and Ubuntu maintainers are so bad, where's the bug report ?
Right here. [lmgtfy.com]
So this must actually be a bug tied to sysv compatibility, as you're talking about these broken ifup/ifdown scripts.
No. Read what I wrote.
The current "recommended" workaround is a pair of ifup/down scripts...
In other words, the scripts aren't broken, they don't exist; the workaround is to create them. It's actually the sysv compatibility layer that allows the fix.
Re:Fuck Me (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank you, these are pretty much exactly my thoughts as well. I am very happy that all the systemd people have found a project to be productive in, and I appreciate some of the things they are trying to do. However, I run a large server farm, I don't need any containers, I don't need parallel boot, and so far, I have seen that they are highly adept at politicking their way into acceptance by various mainstream distro's as a default, and sometimes only init system.
I recently had to recompile Nginx on Ubunty Trusty in order to add some module, and this broke due to an unsatisfied systemd library dependency. Wait, what? Nginx now magically needs to be linked to systemd to compile? The madness is complete in my eyes.
I have since started playing around with Alpine Linux, which is a breath of fresh air in many ways, and barring any unforeseen issues, we will probably slowly migrate our fleet to Alpine. I resent the fact that I am forced to divert time, effort, and resources away from our jobs to deal with this shit. Part of my motivation in using Linux extensively is freedom of choice. The choice to go and roll my own distro isn't the kind of choice I signed up for though. Ubuntu was mostly nice, mostly functional, mostly stable and has mostly up to date packages for everything I need. With Debian, and so Ubuntu, chosing SystemD as a default, and especially looking at all the acrimony surrounding the issue in Debian, I am very fucking worried about where Linux is going to go in the next few years.
I wish I had more time to get into BSD....
Re:Fuck Me (Score:4, Interesting)
Init starts a daemon that watches for the event. This is how inetd worked. Whatever happened to that?
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That sounds like an easily-surmountable technical problem that would leave init simple and delegate this bit to a network-specific thing.
Also, at that point it's not really called a daemon anymore, it's just a program. It's like a CGI script, but for any incoming network connection.
Ah, yes, those so-popular but deadly words. "All You Have To Do Is..."
There are 2 basic approaches to working with modular systems. The old, traditional approach where each module knows what it's doing and how it interfaces with other modules. And the Inversion of Control approach, where the modules have less knowledge of what other modules do and the job of connecting and managing the interfacing.
You can further break down IoC here into the option of having one Master Control Program or a bunch of differen
Re:Fuck Me (Score:4, Insightful)
I think your reply is isingenuous at best.
Whether or not you like it, it's not unfair to classify systemd as being "forced" on its users. For a start, it's wildly popular with distribution builders, but this doesn't mean jack with anyone else. Secondly, for a while (thought they've promised to me that they're trying to and maybe have by now fixed it), GNOME had a hard dependency of systemd. Being the most popular desktop environment more or less forced the hand of many of the distro builders too.
To me, the whole thing seems odd. I've never seen a massive infrastructure change sweep so rapidly through the community of distributions. Especially such a major component, and double especially when things did actually work successfully before.
Anyway, the only think I know for sure is that my arch laptop now boots slower with systemd than with the old RC scripts.
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Not forced on anybody... except when your distro replaced sysvinit with systemd and while you can 'de-replace' it, they already tell you they won't support sysvinit in the future. At this point it becomes 'forced' and you can't really explain it away.
Systemd has been great for *BSD. (Score:4, Interesting)
Systemd is truly the best thing that has ever happened to the BSD community.
Systemd alone is making Linux totally unsuitable for serious use. So what are people doing when a formerly-stable distro like Debian adopts systemd and becomes a disaster? They're moving to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD and PC-BSD.
Just today we find out that DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD [digitalocean.com]. There's clearly a very bright future ahead for the BSDs.
And it's clear now that Linux is on its way out. While Linux and Linux systems will still be around for some time, of course, everyone important who made Linux great in the past is fleeing from it. We're moving to BSD, because unlike the Linux community, the BSD community does things right. Something like systemd would never be taken seriously by them.
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Re:Systemd has been great for *BSD. (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope so, it is always nice for a big group of haters to have a mass-migration. It is a lot healthier than to stay and whine. Those that leave can enjoy their greener grass, and those that stay have them off the lawn. Everybody wins.
If you hate systemd, don't use it. Problem solved!
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Christ almighty, this beast is a fucking monster. What's next, a shell and a userland?
According to the slashdot editors, the next thing is clearly debiand!
Apparently it is to be the systemd module which uses the Debian logo/filter on front page /. articles to clearly indicate a story about generic linux software made by a guy at redhat that emulates behavior in microsoft windows...
After that they will install the new shutupd module, that does nothing but write "Woah slow down there cowboy, you last posted 140*10^12 minutes ago, try again later to give others a chance" to stdout - before repe
Re:Fuck Me (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I can see it now. A stripped Linux kernel will boot, and then in turn will boot the SystemD-OS. The whole thing will be like DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.1, except CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT will be binary files that require special userland tools to decode and manipulate.
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Short version: All your mail are belong to US.
Someone is not going to like that (Score:2)
http://youtu.be/VSbNumR9Z8k [youtu.be]
systemd... (Score:5, Insightful)
systemd seems dead set on becoming an alternative operative system.
Which wouldn't be a bad thing if it wasn't ruining perfectly good operating systems like Debian while it grows.
I've stuck with Debian for a pretty long time (since around 2000) mostly because I know how everything works. But in the last year running testing, more and more frequently I'll find that something has been yanked out and replaced by something harder to use and understand. Maybe it's finally time to switch to BSD instead.
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I'm already heading out the door. New database server is FreeBSD, and probably our Postfix relays within the next couple of months. Routers will stay Linux for a while, I suppose, but that will be about it.
Re:systemd... (Score:5, Informative)
Routers are probably the first thing you want to change. I don't use FreeBSD, but it features zero copy networking for insanely fast routing, which Linux does not.
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I love /. clickbait (Score:5, Funny)
Y'know, for all it's flaws, warts, and Dice-y-ness, I think it's a good sign that the clickbait here is stuff about systemd.
Seriously - on other websites they'll drive up pageviews by posting something like "This just in: politicians you disagree with are EVIL!! EEEEEEVIIIIIL!".
What whips up the /. crowd into a frothy frenzy? :)
Systemd
New mobile OS (Score:5, Funny)
Samsung is coming out with a new line of phones that run SystemD instead of Android.
Thanks but no thanks. (Score:2)
What has happened to Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
What the hell is happening to the Linux ecosystem?
I've been a user of it for a couple of decades now. Although it wasn't perfect, for years it provided a better environment for me than Windows or even OS X could provide.
But that's really started to change maybe within the past 5 years. The first major debacle I can think of is GNOME 3. They went out of their way to ignore everything good about GNOME 2, and instead forced all sorts of stupid ideas upon us.
Firefox is the next debacle I can think of. It's a lot like GNOME 3 in many ways. There was a good, reliable, usable browser in Firefox 3.5. Then it all went to hell in Firefox 4 and beyond.
Now we have systemd, which is obviously dumb in pretty much all respects. It just doesn't fit within the Linux ecosystem at all. That's probably why it's so disruptive.
What makes systemd worse, though, is the impact it has had on pretty much all of the major Linux distros. Pretty much all of the most usable and useful ones (sorry, Slackware, this excludes you) have switched to it, with horrible results.
The stability of my Debian testing system has gone down the shitter since they switched to systemd some time ago. I've had more problems properly booting my system in the past six months than I had in the 15 years prior to systemd getting installed.
I'm torn at this point. I'm probably going to buy a Mac and move to OS X for my personal system, while moving all of my servers over to FreeBSD as soon as I can. I'm pretty sure that I'm done with Linux at this point. I just don't think the ecosystem can be salvaged. So much good software has been ruined.
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The common thread seems to be freedesktop.org. Beware of anything that comes from there.
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"Why did they start going downhill so hard? "
Because they chose somebody coming from an airline (and a CFO on that) for a CEO. What else would you expect?
Re:What has happened to Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they intend to bring stability and unity to Linux by eliminating modularity and choice.
Re: (Score:3)
I like networkmanager. I used to remove it, but that was on wired desktops where it isn't needed at all. On a Wifi desktop, the UI is great at least. The bad thing about it is disabling it is hard, short of uninstalling it (you need to look it up on the internet)
Re: GNOME (Score:4, Informative)
You might want to read this post [wordpress.com] from a few years ago when the GNOME and GTK 3.x were replacing thir 2.x branches. Of particular interest is the quotes of Allan Day (GNOME dev [gnome.org] and RedHat employee):
So not only is this about enforcing a monoculture, the reason to enforce a monoculture is because the desktop isn't about getting work done. No, the desktop - according to GNOME - is for branding/advertizing.
*sigh*
While we're on the subject, I recommend everybody read this post [wordpress.com] by the same author. It's speculative, but it does explain a lot of what has been happening to linux over the last few years... and how it may fit into the large picture.
Noob developers don't know when to stop coding (Score:4, Insightful)
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail.
Noob coders who simply throw more and more code and "problems" are a perfect example. They don't know when to stop coding up solutions in search of problems.
Systemd devs are a perfect example.
Re: (Score:2)
I wish these asshats would go work for Microsoft or Oracle. Those companies deserve this diseased monolithic kind of project development.
Lean and mean... (Score:2)
I'm sure they'll get around to adding Emacs and NetHack functionality to it sooner or later...
FYI: FreeBSD now available on Digital Ocean (Score:5, Interesting)
CB.
All Linux distros will look like this (Score:3)
/vmlinuz /boot/bzImage /sbin/systemd /usr/bin/emacs -> /sbin/systemd
You think I'm kidding... Here, in Lennart's own words:
http://0pointer.net/blog/revis... [0pointer.net]
Re:All Linux distros will look like this (Score:5, Interesting)
"Here, in Lennart's own words"
No, *this* are Lennart's own words:
let's summarize what we are trying to do:
* We want an efficient way that allows vendors to package their software
* We want to allow end users and administrators to install these packages on their systems, regardless which distribution they have installed on it.
* We want a unified solution that ultimately can cover updates for full systems, OS containers, end user apps, programming ABIs, and more.
* We want our images to be trustable (i.e. signed). In fact we want a fully trustable OS
So my reading is: we want Linux ecosystem to disappear and be substituted by Microsoft's business model where there's just one OS (Red Hat) and a set of corporate software vendors.
Put away your pitch forks (Score:4, Informative)
SystemD is not replacing iptables, all they have done is integrate with iptables. Systemd's approach to configuring init "scripts" is superior (no really, it is) but it means that you can't just issue a straight "iptables -t nat..." command and instead have to call it via IPForwarding=yes and IPMasquerade=yes - unless of course you want to start a script with a unit file but then are you sure that iptables is up? Is the filesystem for the script up?
I don't know why I even bother reading the Slashdot comments about SystemD as they always lack critical thinking and instead prefer to cite hyperbole and FUD.
Re: (Score:3)
We who have critical thinking skills don't hate systemD for any alleged replacement of iptables. Its poor design, bugs and errant execution are enough reason. There is the kind of person with high IQ who has no common sense and so cannot make anything of practical value in the real world, instead floundering around making rube goldberg contraptions of needless complexity; such are the SystemD developers.
Re: (Score:3)
I always thought there was a kind of natural selection happening in the linux world.
If systemD is so bad, how is it now the standard in pretty much every distro? It must serve some purpose. On the other hand, complaining about it seems to serve no purpose at all. If the teams who put together every distro thought this way, they wouldn't have used it. No doubt there are some distros that don't use it.
I just don't see the point in all of these complaints. What good does it do?
The existing systems must be infe
Re:Put away your pitch forks (Score:4, Informative)
systemd is fine if you don't want to fiddle with anything. It is great for the current cloud/virtualization hype because it doesn't use arcane text files which are different for each daemon but rather everything is uniformly structured so you can spin up entirely self-automated datacenters with a few presses of a button in a web interface. If you want to change your hostname, you issue a command and everything that supports systemd now has your new hostname.
However if it breaks, it is bad. Things are a mess for humans to read or change, it seems to be entirely built to be used in purpose-built GUI's and web interfaces. It has or will become the registry of Linux. If you want to use something that's not systemd-aware you're either stuck encapsulating old scripts in systemd scripts or building an entire infrastructure of dependencies and requirements around the daemon.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Put away your pitch forks (Score:5, Informative)
unless of course you want to start a script with a unit file but then are you sure that iptables is up?
In all my time using Linux, wondering if iptables had crashed has never been a problem I've had. I've had lots of problems, but never that one. Same with filesystems. Fstab has always just worked.
And an extra layer in front of iptables is the last thing I need. That is a huge negative. I don't even understand why anyone would think that's a good idea.
systemd is hypocritical (Score:5, Interesting)
It annoys me that someone like Poettering, who only had PulseAudio come into use because of the ability distributions had to easily change core operating system components (and wouldn't have had the existing audio-subsystem been entrenched), would then proceed to develop something specifically intended to lock down its own existence and prevent its replacement by something else. It's hypocritical.
While I totally understand why he did it -- nobody wants to put a great amount of time into something only to have it superseded -- it flies in the face of open source in general, where you contribute to an evolving 'thing', and that while your specific contribution may not exist in the future, you can be happy that you took part in the evolution of the whole, and not feel the need to stamp your face on it for perpetuity.
It also sets a dangerous precedent. What's going to be locked down next, in the name of stability, or speed, or whatever else (when it's really about someone trying to 'make their mark'?) Do we lock down the file system? Only one file system for Linux, full stop? Do we lock down the network transports? The window manager? The terminal? The command-line applications?
Then what? Do we then create a global committee, made up of people who maintain the existing components (of course), to make decisions about those components and whatever's left into the future?
I mean, yes, I agree in that case something else will surely (and quickly) rise in Linux's place (I mean, who wants to put in the time to help projects who only exist to serve their creator's vanity) but it seems a shame that Linux should end this way.
My experience with systemd (Score:4, Informative)
1. "What the hell is with these new commands? Great, now I have to learn a whole new way of administration cause people had to change something that was never broken."
2. "Where's all the init files? How am I supposed to configure anything? I don't have time for this..."
3. "Everything is done with service descriptors? Okay..."
4. "So wait, I no longer have to write massive shell scripts that manage the entire process lifecycle, or scour google in the hope that someone else has already written said script so I don't have to?"
5. "Wow, I never realized how much I hated dealing with init scripts until I didn't have to anymore. This is SO much cleaner!"
6. "Whoa, I can monitor and control entire *heirarchies* of dependant services from one command? That's pretty damn slick..."
I still don't completely understand systemd, but now that I'm getting a handle on it, I find it conceptually and functionally cleaner, and more rigorous than the old init system. The downsides are that it's new and therefore has a learning curve, and that it blackboxes the actual service controller which is going to piss off anyone with an ounce of control-freakery in them.
Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? (Score:5, Funny)
I heard the new SystemD Office word processor will be awesome.
Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? (Score:5, Funny)
Just wait for SystemD VM Hypervisor. It will be SystemDs all the way down.
Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? (Score:5, Insightful)
SystemD is the joke that isn't funny. This is just getting ridiculous. Pottering and his band of evil worms are literally trying to intrude their piece of shit Window-esque system into absolutely every corner of Linux. I'm getting out of LInux entirely. If I wanted to run Windows, I'd run fucking Windows.
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Open/Read-Write/Close file I-O cycle for disk scattered .ini files
If your hard disk has a seek time of 8ms, then you will take, on average 4ms to read the file (ini files are usually small enough that reading one 4k block is sufficient). The time to parse it out is pretty much zero if you're doing it right. So the speed argument for using the registry isn't of any value. You won't even notice.
The recovery tools being on a separate partition does NOT help when you lose the drive, which, in my experience, is the only reason to do a system restore/reinstall (gone through
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Have you tried to run Debian 8 without systemd? Systemd-less laptop is not just usable anymore at least on XFCE; usb automount and anything related to gvfs is gone, laptop special keys (backlight, volume) do not work, etc.
Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? (Score:5, Informative)
> Why do you care how other people build their Linux systems?
I don't. If Poettering and company had simply forked GNOME Lenna-X off of GNU Linu-X, there wouldn't be all this complaining. The problem is that Poettering and company have hijacked mainstream linux that almost all linux users use and changed it into something unrecognizable. udev is now built into systemd. The "udev install process" on Gentoo consists of building systemd, but only installing the udev portion. That's why the eudev fork. And some people are running with busybox/mdev in place of udev.
Then there's also dbus, which is being rammed into the kernel. Gnumeric was a great spreadsheet a couple of years ago. But now it's picking up GNOME dependancies all over the place, including dbus. And Skype now requires PulseAudio, another piece of crud from Lennart.
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Thats odd, because my system which only has ALSA allows hot plugging of headsets no problem.
Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? (Score:4, Interesting)
but even Microsoft managed to avoid building a console, web server, and QR code server into its init system.
Actually, when it comes to consoles... they kinda did.
Consoles in Windows run as part of the Client/Server Runtime Subsystem [wikipedia.org], which isn't exactly equivalent to init but kind of is. Killing CSRSS causes a BSOD as it's considered that critical to Windows. (Sort of, apparently it's not a "real" BSOD. Do not ask me what that means, I don't know.)
This was the reason that the Windows console didn't support themes (like the XP theme or the Aero theme) until Windows 7 - it was too tightly coupled to the core OS and Microsoft didn't want to introduce security risks via themes.
Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Systemd's occasional (read: frequent in one of my pcs) failure to shutdown is how I found out that the devs had decided that sysreq was too dangerous for the users to have and had to be disabled.
So I was stuck with a system waiting forever for something to shutdown, and without being able to use sysreq to kill all the processes and unmount file systems safely. Of course, the only way out was a hardware reset, with the subsequent log corruption that let me with no hints on why systemd would not allow my pc to shutdown. Well, at least it got me moving to evaluate the still rational linux distributions out there, as well as the *BSDs, something I had been procrastinating for a few months.
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Cybernetic terminators are in the next release, I'm sure, along with seeding the galaxy with DNA, and a beer recipe database.
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it's the Diseased Crap Nebula of the open source universe.
Hopefully project collapses under its own badly engineered immense weight, or I'm done with GNU/Linux
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I do, but you won't be able to go through doors.
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Just where a Goatse t-shirt.
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Yes, just go to the costume shop and buy one of everything. Put them all on.
Then since you won't be able to move, you can get your friends to roll you to the party so you can sit like a lump in the corner leaving everyone too confused and astonished to actually party.
Re:Stop. Just fucking STOP (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you get that idea? There's no IP forwarding and masquerading in the init process. That all happens in the networkd process.
Re:Time to have them fork off (Score:5, Funny)
The viola will depend on PulseAudio so you'll have to include that too.
Systemd helps RedHat monetize/monopolize Linux (Score:3)
Post below explains it well:
From "SystemD Abomination"
Subject Vested interest in control. RedHat and SystemD
Date Mon, 17 Nov 2014 04:40:08 +0100
by beaverdownunder:
It should be obvious to anyone that RedHat has a vested interest in making the vast majority of Linux distributions dependent on technology it controls. Linux is its bread-and-butter.
It appears RedHat has realised that, through systemd, it can readily provide preferential support for its own projects, and place roadblocks up for