Bisecting with old kernels

Posted Apr 13, 2022 10:55 UTC (Wed) by atnot (subscriber, #124910)
In reply to: Bisecting with old kernels by anselm
Parent article: Systemd discusses its kernel-version needs

I think that, while the initial resistance to systemd was understandable, at this point it is much more fitting to view resistance to it through a social lens than a technical one. The need for, if not systemd, a service manager much like it has been recognized universally enough that at this point, few people even think about it and the main arguments made against it are vague and selective appeals to nontangible things like tradition. This can be surprising when one considers the ferver with which these points are usually argued, as well as the curious lack of people working on serious alternatives to systemd.

A look at the social side can be very enlightening there. While on a technical level, systemd criticism has failed, on a social level it has been immensely succesful. The anti-systemd movement fourished on 4chan in the early 2010s, initially comprising mostly of reactionary and homophobic sentiments towards poettering, who was there seen as the figurehead of the dawn of a more inclusive foss community. This later mutated into being the core of the more moderate anti-systemd movement we know today, as well as a few auxillary ones like the letters in support of stallman. Symbolically rejecting systemd is table stakes for being accepted in these communities, and this is where I think one finds the true reason for the continued ferver.

The lack of compelling technical arguments or alternatives is because ultimately, what systemd symbolizes has become much more important than any of it's technical merits. This has only increased with perceived symbolic losses like code of conducts and discussions of inclusivity. And while of course, I am still painting with a very broad brush here as of 2022, I think those strokes will become more and more accurate as the movement continues to radicalize and shed less extreme members as it has over the last decade.

Bisecting with old kernels

Posted Apr 13, 2022 13:47 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Symbolically rejecting systemd is table stakes for being accepted in these communities, and this is where I think one finds the true reason for the continued ferver.

There's also the issue that some people who have grown up with the traditional system and are heavily invested in having learnt its weird ins and outs hate to see it replaced by something that is more straightforward and unified (let alone technically superior), because that undermines their status as the venerable “greybeards” who Know Things That Mere Mortals Cannot Fathom. People used to defer to their wisdom, and of course we can't have young upstarts like that Poettering taking over and changing everything just because they can. Who do these runts think they are? There ought to be a rite of passage. (Also there must be a conspiracy involved because it is obviously impossible that people would actually prefer something like systemd for its technical merits; it is clear that some nefarious means must have somehow been used to brainwash all the big Linux distributions into adopting it against the collective resistance of the “greybeards”.)

Right now we're seeing this once more with the “/ vs. /usr” debate, where the main counterargument apart from “Resist Poettering forever!” is basically “That's how we always did it and we don't want it to change”, with a side order of irrelevant mumbo-jumbo like “/ is faster than /usr”, even though the real reason (PDP-11 hard disks in the 1970s were too small) is very well known, other Unix vendors have already done the change, and today there are obvious technical advantages to merging the two. This is systemd all over again.

Bisecting with old kernels

Posted Apr 13, 2022 19:56 UTC (Wed) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link]

> Things That Mere Mortals Cannot Fathom

My pet theory is that things like Linux, slowly but certainly, getting easier to run on PC's, virtualization and cloud computing making running servers easy too, and - the big one - mobile phones making countless, almost magical things really easy for almost everyone made clear to many system administrators that their expertise wouldn't be needed for much longer.

It's hard to prove, but I do think the vocal systemd opponents were just shouting as hard as they could to make that future, where their expertise wasn't needed that much, please disappear.

anti-systemd is a broad church

Posted Apr 13, 2022 14:56 UTC (Wed) by karath (subscriber, #19025) [Link] (3 responses)

The above analysis feels mostly true. One sub-community that it appears not to cover are the greybeards* that started with Unix/BSD/Linux in the 70s/80s/90s that had very hard-won experience and expertise that was overturned by the simplicity that systemd introduced. While systemd could not make Linux 'sing' like they could, all of the major distros adopted it and they felt threatened with irrelevance. On the other hand, many others with similar deep expertise did make the jump to systemd, but that's not something that anyone really rants about.

What this means is that few are looking into systemd to find real technical issues. For example, would it make sense to spin out parts of systemd into separate repositories? My feeling is that this is self-censorship - if I conceptually support systemd and then I publicly criticise/question it, then could I be tagged as one of those rabid anti-systemders?

* I am an actual greybeard that started using and programming on Unix v6 in 1980 - but I went in another direction and really only got back to hobby usage of Linux in the past 10 years.

anti-systemd is a broad church

Posted Apr 13, 2022 17:53 UTC (Wed) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link] (2 responses)

The reason I didn't bring up greybeards is because I don't think they actually played a very big role in what happened with systemd. I'm sure the greybeards grumbled plenty — that's what they do — but rarely does that result in more than obnoxious email theads, nevermind people getting death threats. What made systemd different is that a much broader audience took up the cause. I mean, if one has the misfortune of going to a website like reddit even today, one will still find no shortage of people who installed linux a year ago exhalting the great evils of systemd. Among these were a subcrowd for whom this was not merely about pid1, but the future of FOSS, the west, nay humanity itself (I am not joking), which would eventually remain as the core of the most vocal opposition.

That is not to say that the greybeards hold no responsibility for what happened. But I personally believe that if nobody but them had been stoking the flames, the whole controversy would have probably died down within five years at most.

anti-systemd is a broad church

Posted Apr 13, 2022 18:21 UTC (Wed) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link]

...and that would, I think your right, certainly have put us in a more productive and fruitful environment for criticizing systemd than what we have today.

anti-systemd is a broad church

Posted Apr 14, 2022 12:11 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The other two components I see are that Poettering's "style" of software development is to consider the system as a whole, not just his package's piece of it and that Poettering is happy to do the non-coding work involved in keeping the contributor pool healthy.

The first one leads to issues like early PulseAudio releases, where PulseAudio refused to work around bugs in ALSA drivers; instead, Poettering insisted that the drivers should be fixed to correctly implement the ALSA API. Other users of the ALSA API were happy to work around bugs in drivers, and some drivers had simply implemented the API well enough to make common applications of the era work, but had bugs in implementations of things like snd_pcm_query_chmaps, snd_pcm_rewind and the mixer controls that would result in issues for a caller that expected the API contract to be met. Because PulseAudio was the only significant ALSA client at the time (JACK was the other, but users of JACK tended to own sound hardware with good drivers) that cared about the quality of your ALSA driver implementation, Poettering got an unfairly bad reputation, not helped by Ubuntu forcing people over to PulseAudio at a point where the PulseAudio developers (including Poettering) felt it wasn't ready for widespread adoption because they were still sorting through the driver bugs that needed to be fixed.

It also leads to people not liking systemd because it used features of the Linux kernel that had previously been ignored by most users. Poettering took (and takes) the view that if a feature is not meant to be used, then it should not be in the kernel, which has upset certain people who consider features systemd depends upon to be of sufficiently poor quality that they should be removed.

The second point, about looking after the contributor pool, means that Poettering puts up with flak aimed at him when it's in fact someone else's learning curve that's causing the errors; so usrmerge (which was mostly Kay Sievers and Harald Hoyer) gets blamed on Poettering because Poettering wrote it up clearly. When Kay Sievers made a bad decision in udev, Poettering got the flak because he explained the background to that decision, and why, given the context, it wasn't an obviously bad decision to make until the consequences became clear.