Is systemd unix?

Posted Apr 26, 2012 8:22 UTC (Thu) by ebirdie (guest, #512)
In reply to: Is systemd unix? by ebiederm
Parent article: The return of the Unix wars?

The above comments are excellent additions (in lack of a better word to addition) forcing me to comment.

tajyrink brings me to a question in the importance of brands, why there isn't yet a brand for Linux/FOSS technologies to apply for by manufacturers? The brand could use the ideas and message, what Microsoft has used for ages: "based on NT technology", "based on Microsoft technologies". I don't remember exact wordings from Microsoft and can't go after them right now, but similar approach/message with an example like "build on tried and true FOSS tech with Open Source ideals" could be useful.

ebiederm expands the view excellently above. There must be hundreds examples fitting to conversation and I'd like to bring my latest concerns from Open Source/Linux storage technologies. About five years ago I was wondering and asking the same questions, what Russell Coker asked in his blog this year: Reliability of RAID. Russell has concluded that ZFS and BTRFS are the way of future in storage. I agree on his concerns, how to be sure that data sitting on platter stays valid and how to detect, when the underlaying piece of technology starts to melt down. But I don't agree on his conclusions that stuffing everything to file systems is the right thing to do. I like the Unix tool approach here as well and that is what I see in current crop of storage technologies in device monitoring with technologies like smartmon / LVM / MD software RAID / file systems / some application level data integrity tools for data integrity / object storage solutions / network storage solutions. That is quite a bunch of technologies to play with and they don't play THAT well together eg., what I can tell from experience, slicing and dicing file systems ie. resizing them with LVM tools has not worked for me out of the box. I think it is not to blame LVM developers, but a sign of problem in Open Source technology community working as a whole producing a coherent working storage stack by the Unix tool approach. In sense of unix tool concept I find the storage stack lacking pipe, stdin/-out, regular expressions and argument syntax/semantics enabling the stack glued together by seemingly independent projects like LVM or MD. In this respect I see ZFS and BTRFS very appealing practical solutions. I hope my readers can see my point in looking at the whole and not derail from details.

In my wondering about RAID and its purpose I concluded that it is not RAID's job to care about data integrity but to provide continuance and uninterruptibility in case of maintenance or disaster. Some other tools must do the job detecting signs of rising problems, identifying the problem to a disk or a controller and either issuing hot-replace event to RAID subsystem or a warning to system logs for admin to spot for action.

In the above I must place my thanks to Neil Brown's articles both here at LWN.net and in his blog.