Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 21, 2013 5:35 UTC (Thu) by luto (guest, #39314)
In reply to: Which init system for Debian? by rodgerd
Parent article: Which init system for Debian?

Sorry to snipe, but I'm sure not going to write that code when the systemd people have said over and over that, even if it were possible to cleanly do such a thing, they wouldn't want it.

My point here is that what systemd is doing with cgroups is ugly and will, once single-hierarchy rules go into effect, suck for a decently large group of users. The kernel could provide a better facility, and everyone (including, most likely, systemd's code complexity) would win if systemd started using it. As a side benefit, if the API were nice, maybe other OSes could adopt it.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 21, 2013 6:10 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

It would make more sense to extend launchd or fork systemd and rewrite the internals for a different OS kernel, maintaining that as a separate project, than to try and add the complexity to systemd of trying to make the internals modular across different OS kernels. I think that's an honest and reasonable technical position to take, presuming an API level of the underlying components (Linux kernel version blah) makes for much simpler programming than if you have to test and fall back for every possible feature incompatibility.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 21, 2013 9:51 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Systemd internals are already quite modular and there are many small functions which can be used as points where you may add portbility glue. It's different kind of decision: it's not that Linux offers easier programming model, it's the fact that Linux offers fixed programming model. You don't need to debate how certain function functionality like crypttab or ConditionPathIsMountPoint should be implemnted under different OSes or, more importantly, even if it can be implemented under different OSes! If something is seriously lacking in Linux kernel then it can be added to Linux kernel, after all…

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 21, 2013 13:06 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

are you arguing that Debian kFreeBSD/HURD/etc should just implement the needed linuxisms (cgroups,etc) in kFreeBSD/HURD/etc? 'cause it actually looks like a nice idea, if anyone should be up to it...

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 21, 2013 19:26 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

They don't want *BSD and Hurd compatibility code in their source base because it'd be very intrusive in a lot of places. They would have no way to test it and no way to fix it if they should inadvertently break it.

That looks like a perfectly reasonable decision to me, and looking at that list of Linux idioms in systemd I agree that it'd make more sense to fork the thing.
Assuming that anybody actually wants to do the work, which frankly I doubt – it'd be quite substantial.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 21, 2013 21:01 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

> I'm sure not going to write that code when the systemd people have said over and over that, even if it were possible to cleanly do such a thing, they wouldn't want it.

No, you got it backwards. They're saying that:
1. Such a port would not be clean.
2. BSD developers wouldn't be interested in adopting systemd anyway.

And because of these 2 reasons, they don't consider any porting effort to be worthwhile to merge/maintain. It would be quite silly to maintain a whole FreeBSD port for the Debian/kFreeBSD people alone.

The goal of systemd has from the start been to unify many of the distro-specific bits, and to be adopted by default across Linux distros. They consider that very unlikely to happen in the BSD world -- that they would adopt a critical core component that's licensed under GPL and led by Linux overlords.

But they are reasonable people. If you could demonstrate them being wrong on both counts, I'm sure they would reconsider. Even if, as you imply, (1) is doable then I would be extremely suspicious about (2).