systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 25, 2012 5:28 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits by dlang
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Quality has a new name

He's a sysadmin. Of course he wants to dictate what you do on the system :)
(joke)

But in all seriousness, the whole "SysV init is simpler" thing just ain't true. And you can still write SysV init scripts under either Upstart or Systemd, if you feel like you must.

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 25, 2012 11:04 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, it is, and it isn't at the same time.

Init, the process, is simple. It's code is simple, because it's job is simple. And that's because the grunt work is left for the shell scripts that init runs. Init itself doesn't do much.

If you consider init, plus the directory layout conventions, plus the script conventions, plus the additional tools, then maybe init is not so much simpler than Systemd or Upstart. But all that is optional, mind you. Remember how Arjan van de Ven got his system booting to desktop in just five seconds. They did so with plain old init (and plenty of ingenuity).

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 25, 2012 14:41 UTC (Wed) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link]

The same Arjan is now working with the systemd folks and pushed systemd into multiple intel projects, simply because it offers the best performance.

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 25, 2012 19:16 UTC (Wed) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

Hm. If one trusts this source [1], Debian SysV is the most concise, by a long shot.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRC#Size_and_complexity>

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 26, 2012 22:49 UTC (Thu) by s0f4r (guest, #52284) [Link]

The same Arjan who game the talk at Linux Plumbers together with me. And, our newest work will reduce boot time even further, while doing more, be more robust, and scale across many more services and devices in systems.

Arjan and me are supporting systemd in many ways, with code, feedback, prototypes and exploration of unwritten mechanisms.

For example, at the Tizen Conference in May, I will be presenting a prototype `systemd --user` initialized desktop that entirely removes XDG autostart in favor of treating everything that starts as `a service`, even for user-started programs (such as, Xorg, your window manager, the session bus).

sysvinit didn't scale - we knew that already in 2009, which is exactly why we had been talking with Lennert and folks for a loooong time to come up with something better.

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 25, 2012 15:40 UTC (Wed) by jedidiah (guest, #20319) [Link]

The simpler part of init scripts is not the scripts themselves but how they interact with each other. As far as the script themselves being unmaintainable spaghetti, you can do that with any language. I am sure as Upstart gains more traction more cruft and craziness will build up.

Init and bash are things that have had decades to show it's warts.

You just haven't given Upstart a chance yet. '-)