The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate
The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate
Posted Nov 13, 2014 8:28 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815)In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by jonnor
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate
So, where did I use the word monolithic? Sometimes, it seems that you systemd fanboys all have a copy of Lennart's "30 myths about systemd" in front of you and then randomly throw one point of it at anybody having any issue with systemd.
I was actually talking about the intrusiveness of systemd and in that respect Linux generally alwas played along nicely with the unix ecosystem: it just does what a kernel is supposed to do and nothing else. And kernels naturally have to be a bit platform dependend on the inside, as they talk to hardware, you know. Yes, the internal abi for drivers is unstable, but the API of a kernel is called syscalls and while Linux has added a few over time (we're talking about more than 20 years here), it always made life easy for software developers to support the standard ones up until now. And believe me, that was sometimes quite a fight, but Linux always stuck to the principle: once an api has been in use by software, it is a regression to change it and a no-go. Now that's hardly comparable to systemd's approach of apis, systemd for instance just broke rtkit because Lennart decided to throw something out and the response is not: sorry, I put it back in, but it is of course: oh, we might just integrate rtkit into systemd as well.
And about the 10 mio lines of code: a large part of it is drivers for the tons and tons of sometimes buggy devices Linux supports, by working around their bugs so users like you and me can run Linux on all sorts of hardware. Now, if Lennart would have written a kernel, it would have of course never supported buggy hardware, which probably means it had supported scsi disks from two vendors, no ide, because it's obsolete shit anyways, one graphic card, one soundcard and two nics. Like Apple does. But there people that chose Linux, because it is not like Apple, you know.
I was actually talking about the intrusiveness of systemd and in that respect Linux generally alwas played along nicely with the unix ecosystem: it just does what a kernel is supposed to do and nothing else. And kernels naturally have to be a bit platform dependend on the inside, as they talk to hardware, you know. Yes, the internal abi for drivers is unstable, but the API of a kernel is called syscalls and while Linux has added a few over time (we're talking about more than 20 years here), it always made life easy for software developers to support the standard ones up until now. And believe me, that was sometimes quite a fight, but Linux always stuck to the principle: once an api has been in use by software, it is a regression to change it and a no-go. Now that's hardly comparable to systemd's approach of apis, systemd for instance just broke rtkit because Lennart decided to throw something out and the response is not: sorry, I put it back in, but it is of course: oh, we might just integrate rtkit into systemd as well.
And about the 10 mio lines of code: a large part of it is drivers for the tons and tons of sometimes buggy devices Linux supports, by working around their bugs so users like you and me can run Linux on all sorts of hardware. Now, if Lennart would have written a kernel, it would have of course never supported buggy hardware, which probably means it had supported scsi disks from two vendors, no ide, because it's obsolete shit anyways, one graphic card, one soundcard and two nics. Like Apple does. But there people that chose Linux, because it is not like Apple, you know.