Time for openSUSE to go all-in with systemd?

Systemd was designed to bring better performance, better control, and easier configurability to the system initialization and service control task. According to many, it has succeeded in those goals. It also tends to bring a certain amount of unhappiness to those who see no driving reason to make fundamental changes to a key part of the system - especially if those changes sometimes break things. OpenSUSE is not the first distribution to transition to systemd, but its experience in some ways mirrors that of those who came before. Now the distribution is considering plans to move exclusively to systemd, leaving the old SYSV init system behind entirely. Needless to say, not everybody is amused.

The current openSUSE release - 12.1, was the first to feature systemd, but it continues to support the SYSV init system as well. For better or for worse, though, the distribution developers made the decision that old systems, when upgraded to 12.1, would be transitioned to systemd automatically. That is where the trouble starts; there are, it would seem, a lot of things that do not yet work all that well with systemd. That has led to the automatic switch being added to the 12.1 most annoying bugs list, along with instructions on how to switch back to SYSV init.

When Fedora made this transition, the Fedora 14 release was initially targeted as the first systemd-based release, but Fedora eventually decided to wait one more cycle to allow things to stabilize. That decision seems to have worked out reasonably well, even though Fedora users, arguably, are used to disruptive changes and could have handled it. In retrospect, perhaps openSUSE should have done the same thing and given systemd another release cycle to settle in. Or, failing that, they could have held off on the automatic switch to systemd, leaving it as an "opt-in" choice for their more adventurous users. But, as they say, hindsight is always 20-20.

The end result is that, when Cristian Rodríguez posted a proposal to phase out SYSV init entirely in favor of systemd, he was not rewarded with universal acclaim. There was some substantial grumbling about the perceived instability of systemd-based installations and the desire to push users toward technology that is not yet ready for prime time. For example:

The openSUSE developers seem to agree, at this point, that the transition was a bit premature and that it has caused some unneeded pain for users; some apologies have been seen on the list. But that still leaves them with the problem of figuring out where to go from here. One option would be to back out systemd entirely, write it off as a bad idea, and recommit to SYSV init (or switch to upstart). There does not appear to be any sign that this option is under consideration; for better or for worse, systemd appears to be seen as the future for openSUSE.

Given that, there is no alternative to making systemd work better. Cristian proposed a three-phase plan to so do. The first step would be to address all known bugs in systemd itself, which makes sense: until the foundation is stable, it is hard to build stable structures on top of it. The second phase involves getting rid of purely hardware-related init scripts and adding systemd unit files to packages that need them. The final stage includes the removal of SYSV init and something called "profit". By all appearances, it is a straightforward plan to further the transition to systemd.

Nobody disagrees with the idea of making systemd work better. But there was some real discomfort with a perceived haste to eliminate SYSV init. Once the old init system is gone, there will be no alternative to running systemd, like it or not, and it appears that some users do not like it.

That puts openSUSE into a bit of a bind. There is a real cost to keeping SYSV init around and functioning; it is a complex and crucial system component that is easily broken if the distribution developers are not running it regularly. Maintaining both systems will also reduce the number of users and testers for systemd, with the result that bugs will take longer to find and to fix. The desire to keep a tried-and-true alternative around is understandable, but, at some point, the costs of doing so are likely to be to high.

That said, there is no talk of removing SYSV init for the 12.2 release, and possibly for some time thereafter. Systemd, along with all the services that interact with it, needs to be brought up to a higher level of stability first. That should be enough work to keep the openSUSE developers busy for a little while yet. Experience suggests that systemd-based openSUSE should stabilize quickly enough, and soon this transition will just be a memory. The road to that place may yet have a rough spot or two, though.

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