The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition (Project Zero)

Posted Aug 28, 2014 12:37 UTC (Thu) by jb.1234abcd (guest, #95827)
In reply to: The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition (Project Zero) by anselm
Parent article: The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition (Project Zero)

I have already posted here on systemd's attack on UNIX/Linux software
development model and its shared ecosystem, and systemd's faulty design and
implementation, after Debian's decision to accept it as their default init
system.

May I remind all apologists of systemd that it was supposed to be a replacement for previous (but still alive) init systems.

Here is an update on systemd for you.

Jul 2014
Lennart Poettering gave a talk recently in Beijing about the state of systemd and its future ahead.

Lennart keynoted at the joint FUDCon Beijing 2014 with GNOME.Asia 2014 event and he talked about the current position of systemd and its future going forward, while acknowledging it's evolved more than just being a basic init system to being "a set of basic building blocks to build an OS from."

The tasks mentioned that systemd already covers include, "init system, journal logging, login management, device management, temporary and volatile file management, binary format registration, backlight save/restore, rfkill save/restore, bootchart, readahead, encrypted storage setup, EFI/GPT partition discovery, virtual machine/container registration, minimal container management, hostname management, locale management, time management, random seed management, sysctl variable management, and console managment."

Tasks being worked on are support for a local DNS cache, mDNS responder, LLMNR responder, DNSSEC verification, IPC support in the kernel (KDBUS), time synchronization with NTP, better integration with containers, and many other services.

Well, I remember also that he assured everybody that the UNIX/Linux bazaar
development model will be respected in the future.

The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition (Project Zero)

Posted Aug 28, 2014 12:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Where did he assure that?

The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition (Project Zero)

Posted Aug 28, 2014 12:54 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Tasks being worked on are support for a local DNS cache, mDNS responder, LLMNR responder, DNSSEC verification, IPC support in the kernel (KDBUS), time synchronization with NTP, better integration with containers, and many other services.

Sounds great to me.

Well, I remember also that he assured everybody that the UNIX/Linux bazaar development model will be respected in the future.

At this point two things are probably worth mentioning:

Contrary to popular belief, Lennart Poettering is not the sole developer of systemd. In fact there is now a fairly large and active development community around it, including people affiliated with many different Linux distributions. This helps ensure, at least, that systemd represents a consensus that most Linux distributors can live with, rather than the foibles of one single person. (Incidentally, nobody seems to mind that Linus Torvalds is still in charge of Linux.)
Also contrary to popular belief, systemd is not a single huge monolithic take-it-or-leave-it thing. It is good to see people working on standardised solutions for various problems within the Linux sphere under the systemd umbrella, because such solutions have a very good chance of actually becoming part of most Linux systems by way of the mainstream distributions incorporating systemd. For example, it would be very useful indeed to have a widely deployed DNS resolver that can verify DNSSEC, which right now distributions do not tend to offer by default. If in the future the verifying DNS resolver within systemd is not to people's liking, they will be able to either improve it or else replace it with another resolver that they like better, but whatever systemd comes with is likely to be at least a baseline implementation that will get the functionality into the hands of most Linux users without the need for them to sort this out themselves.

The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition (Project Zero)

Posted Aug 28, 2014 13:26 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Most of those examples are separate utilities that ship under the systemd umbrella which you can use or not use at your choice and most of those functions were handled by the initscripts in the previous SysV based system so there really hasn't been a change of where the functionality lives, even if you are using shell scripts you still need to be able to cover all those use cases.