The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 18, 2014 22:52 UTC (Tue) by cdmiller (guest, #2813)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by niner
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

The technical side is still debatable as evidenced below. There is apparent confusion over common failure modes of the binary log and what log data is available or potentially lost after a failure. Folks appear to not fully understand or agree with the explanation. The timing of the more detailed response is troubling. What you posted above appeared over a year after the initial bug report. Suffice it to say I'm not convinced systemd-journald log corruption handling is sufficient for servers, or that anything more robust is being pursued.

According to one post below, interesting defaults are being set for logging configuration in RHEL7. The configuration described looks like a band aid to side step this and possibly other issues.

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 19, 2014 0:35 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (1 responses)

TO be honest, journald *features* are nice, but the implementation detail still seems like the main weakness in systemd-the-suite-of-programs. I don't quite understand why the binary blob DB isn't based on an already extant DB, for example (Gnu DB, Berkely, whatever), and the corruption and lack of a remote logging mechanism undermine the work Lennart did to try and make it more useful as an audit tool.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 19, 2014 11:07 UTC (Wed) by mchapman (subscriber, #66589) [Link]

> I don't quite understand why the binary blob DB isn't based on an already extant DB

The official answer to that can be found at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.systemd.devel....

I have read through the journal file format specification [1] and the code that implements it [2], and from what I can tell it looks reasonably straight-forward. I have no doubt bugs will be discovered. That is inevitable with any non-trivial code. But there's really no reason to believe that these bugs will go unfixed. It's not as if it's "new" code, anyway -- people have been using it now for years.

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-...
[2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/plain/src/jou...