Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version [LWN.net]

Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version

Posted Mar 1, 2012 11:52 UTC (Thu) by lacos (subscriber, #70616)
In reply to: Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version by AndreE
Parent article: Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version

"So Debian doesn't have modern open source radeon drivers with KMS?"

Of course it has one.

Ian Jackson said "base our system". The "modern open source radeon drivers with KMS" is not the basis of the system. You don't even use it on Linux if you have a different graphics adapter.

On the other hand, you have to *boot* into runlevel 3 (or 5) no matter what.

I see my decision to run Debian at home 100% vindicated.

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Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version

Posted Mar 2, 2012 6:07 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]

Not quite.

"Accepting systemd, in the current state,
means permanently tying ourselves to the Linux kernel."

By accepting kms and radeon you are already permanently tied to the Linux kernel. It's a very poor argument against adoption.

Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version

Posted Mar 2, 2012 12:38 UTC (Fri) by lacos (subscriber, #70616) [Link]

"By accepting kms and radeon you are already permanently tied to the Linux kernel."

I really don't understand your point.

Consider the current stable release, Squeeze, with two (kernel, arch) pairs: (Linux, amd64) and (FreeBSD, amd64). You can boot both, have runlevels, services, daemons and so on.

Using the Linux kernel, I do have kms / radeon support. In the kFreeBSD flavor I may not have KMS, but X11 is there:

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/kfreebsd-amd64/ch02...

That X11 version, on top of the FreeBSD kernel, may or may not support all features of a modern Radeon GPU. You most probably will have some basic graphics support. But even if you don't, it doesn't mean that you can't run Debian Squeeze *at all* on FreeBSD. It only means that your graphics card is not (fully) supported. You can still perfectly well run daemons on a headless server that way, for example. So, kms / radeon does not tie Debian to the Linux kernel.

On the other hand, if you rebase Debian onto systemd, that makes the boot process (ie. reaching one of the multiuser runlevels) dependent on Linux kernel features, like cgroups. If you have systemd, you can't even *boot* Debian on top of a FreeBSD kernel.

(Obviously, upstart and systemd are mutually exclusive; it's practically impossible to support both with all services. So you can't say "boot Debian/Linux with upstart, and Debian/kFreeBSD with systemd.)

The *layer* where the system becomes dependent on Linux-only features is completely different. Considering KMS/radeon, it's (accelerated) graphics. Considering systemd, it's *booting*.

I may have misunderstood your point, of course.

Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version

Posted Mar 2, 2012 12:41 UTC (Fri) by lacos (subscriber, #70616) [Link]

"(Obviously, upstart and systemd are mutually exclusive; it's practically impossible to support both with all services. So you can't say "boot Debian/Linux with upstart, and Debian/kFreeBSD with systemd.)"

Sorry, I mixed up those two in my argument, but you get my point.