Arch Linux to migrate to Systemd

Systemd takes a reliable, known, thoroughly debugged process (init, or various of its tweaks, including Ubuntu's <i>upstart</i> and Debian's <i>insserv</i>), and converts booting from a deterministic, predictable process to one that's inherently <i>unpredictable</i>.<p>And the stated objective? "To reduce boot times".<p>The best way to reduce boot times is to <i>not boot</i>. The <i>reason</i> I reboot systems is <i>to return them to a known good state</i> (or, very rarely, to perform a kernel upgrade).<p>On server hardware, I perform boots infrequently, and really, really, really want them to work right.<p>On end-user hardware, I perform boots infrequently, preferring to use suspend/restore to quiesce my systems (suspend to RAM, occasionally suspend to disk). <i>That</i> is a process which I'd like to have very thoroughly debugged and not give me any unhappy surprises (say: crash my video, e.g.: interactive session, lose track of drivers/hardware, especially wireless).<p>Systemd is the wrong answer to the wrong problem.<p>Much written better than I can: <a href="http://blog.mywarwithentropy.com/2010/10/upstart-better-init-or-more-painful-one.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mywarwithentropy.com/2010/10/upstart-better-init...</a><p>Systemd loses the huge transitivity of shell scripting, and puts you in the position of needing to acquire a novel skill at the one time you least need to be <i>learning</i> and most need to be <i>applying</i>: when your systems won't boot straight: <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/494711/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/494711/</a><p>I'm also not much surprised that Red Hat, who've had such a historic problem with consistency and reliable dependency management within their packaging system (as compared to Debian/Ubuntu) are proponents of this technology (hint: it's not the package format, it's the policy, or lack thereof). And now Arch.

The opposition that is seen from some people to moving away from SysV style init is amazing to me. I don't have much experience with systemd, but upstart has been a refreshing change from the old shell scripts.<p>Having been both on the packaging side, as well as the admin side, I can't imagine <i>not</i> abandoning the daemonize and PID file paradigm. The number of package I've seen that have init scripts that don't properly stop or start the daemon, or don't check the pid file and or subsys lock file; or daemons that don't properly chdir, or don't release an errant file descriptor, make me want to scream. Not to mention the process monitoring and full lifecycle management, it just seems like a no-brainer decision.<p>There's a lot of noise coming from people saying that their laptop doesn't need it, booting isn't that slow, etc; the driving force isn't targeting laptops/desktop, it's targeting the largest use of Linux -- servers. The process management is the big win, and boot time is just a bonus.

systemd is so obviously better than anything out there, I'm surprised there is any controversy. I've yet to see a valid complaint.<p>"Poettoering sucks! PulseAudio!" That's not much of a technical argument against systemd, now is it? Pretty much everyone who complains about PulseAudio doesn't even know what it is; they just blame it when their audio doesn't work (usually for some unrelated reason).<p>"It's not deterministic!" You're probably talking abot the socket activation. That part is pletny deterministic - a message comes in for a service, that service gets started. Are the messages coming in not deterministic enough for you? You can add your own unit files that starts the service at boot, and you can even control what starts before and after the service.<p>"Shell scripts are so simple!" You know what's simpler than a shell script? A unit file. They are also more consistent. The various shell scripts are all written by different package maintainers and are rediculously diverse. Some are full-featured init scripts that can send signals to the service to make it do stuff; others can't even restart the service. Unit files are so simple that it's pretty hard for any different styles to really matter.<p>Also, the method for enabling a service is different in all the distributions with shell scripts. Debian is update-rc.d; Red Hat is chkconfig; Arch is vi /etc/rc.conf. With everything moving to systemd, we finally have one way: systemctl.

I've been running systemd on my computers for a few months now, and it's great. Dramatically accelerates my boot times, easy to configure, and easy to use. The only problem I've ever had is when a daemon doesn't include a systemd unit file, and I imagine official migration will include resolving all the remaining cases of that.

There's a whole bunch of tools groping awkardly in a single direction here:<p>1. Give a graph to the computer<p>2. The computer makes the graph a reality<p><a href="http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reigning-in-chaos/" rel="nofollow">http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...</a><p>Puppet, Chef, Cfengine come at it from an on-disk direction.<p>Upstart, SMF, systemd, launchd come at it from a runtime direction.<p>They're still talking past each other. And it's annoying.<p>What I would really like is a system that does <i>both</i> as first-class citizens. I may be waiting a while.

I don't really understand the problems these "init" replacements wish to solve. I mean, actual, real-world problems. To me, it's just another instance of the same worrisome trend that brought us NetworkManager and makes everything evolve to integrate with D-Bus: do everything to make desktop-Linux better, even if it negatively impacts the use-cases where Linux is actually successful (everything else).<p>I don't care much for the desktop, but I do care for servers.<p>Boot times on servers are irrelevant. Reducing them brings little benefit. Servers shouldn't have to be rebooted that often for it to matter, and also, servers spend most of their boot time POSTing and initializing firmware for the various cards. In many cases, twice as much as it takes to boot a normal SysV init Linux install.<p>Not only that, but it is much more important to be able to effectively troubleshoot boot problems than to get some dubious features that nobody really felt missing for all these decades.<p>I don't care if Fedora or Arch do this, but I do care if more server-oriented distributions do. I still haven't gotten over the fact that RHEL6 now gives you the option of using NetworkManager (bleh) or configuring interfaces through (badly designed) configuration files. What's wrong with the old system-config-network?

It's too bad that opposition to changes like this is often expressed so trollishly. There's a real tradeoff here (of simplicity and of portability) that gets glossed over.

see here the discussion `systemd vs upstart` (the default on ubuntu):<p><a href="http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5877/what-are-the-pros-cons-of-upstart-and-systemd" rel="nofollow">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5877/what-are-the-pr...</a><p>and here the design docs of systemd:<p><a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html" rel="nofollow">http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html</a><p>overall i think systemd is a much better implementation toward the same goal. some distros have already switched from upstart to it, not saying that upstart is not an extremely popular choice as well.

Allen McRae had an interesting, relvant post recently- "Are We Removing What Defines Arch Linux?"<p><a href="http://allanmcrae.com/2012/08/are-we-removing-what-defines-arch-linux/" rel="nofollow">http://allanmcrae.com/2012/08/are-we-removing-what-defines-a...</a>

Here's the (much more readable) mailing list in gmane: <a href="http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.arch.devel" rel="nofollow">http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.arch.devel</a><p>Currently (Friday 3:48 Pacific time), this thread is at the top.<p>Edit: Lots of +1s in the early thread messages; some elaboration surrounding migration issues in later emails.

In my biased opinion, once you have gotten over the learning curve, nothing beats daemontools for running services. It is a fantastic set of tools. Why some OS doesn't just embrace djbware I'll never understand. It compiles, smoothly, in seconds. (There's no need for distributing binaries.) And the chances of the author initiating lawsuits (as some Linux foundations are known to do), over something placed in the "public domain" are close to nil. He's got better things to do.<p>BSD's rc system is fine. Sometimes the scripts are too verbose. But the whole idea is the system is simple enough to understand that you can write your own scripts -- more concisely, if you wish. You don't need to read a book (e.g. Linux from Scratch), keep most things disabled by default and let the user turn stuff on as they need it.<p>I recently used Debian's live USB, the rescue version, for a little while and was amazed at how much stuff is turned on by default. I guess if you understand each and every choice that's been made for you it's OK. But if not, that approach is not very conducive to learning.<p>As for Apple, never mind all the XML fluff, good luck trying to understand what's going on behind the scenes with their computers anymore. They can't even manage to let you have an nsswitch.conf or equivalent.

The link is to a proposal, rather than an announcement, but the replies seem very positive, which bodes well.

they should just migrate to openrc, i heard debian might actually do that. would be there 2nd nice choice this month after switching to xfce as default de