Avoiding systemd isn't hard

http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html

by jorgecastillo • 12 years ago

170 97 12 years ago

vitavonni.de

namarkiv• 12 years ago

On gentoo, we have virtual/service-manager[0], that allows you to use openrc/systemd/runit/daemontools.

[0] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/virt...

taeric2• 12 years ago

I thought the big concern is that it isn't hard yet.

Alupis6• 12 years ago

it will only get "hard" if software projects bake in hard-dependencies to systemd, like the gnome project has (because they thought/think it provides a lot of benefits, and imho it does). Even so, there are plenty of shims being built that provide the small amount of api compatibility necessary to make things like gnome work on non-systemd systems (FreeBSD for example).

taeric2• 12 years ago

So, it is going to get hard, is what you are saying?

I mean, it could be that the shims are nice and easy, but it seems to be the expectation that this will not be the case, right? Especially since systemd seems to be on a very aggressive expansion of responsibilities campaign.

makomk• 12 years ago

I know the systemd developers are now planning on making udev depend on systemd in the near future, and that's pretty essential for desktop/server Linux.

dingaling• 12 years ago

I thought the big concern is that it isn't hard yet.

And once it is a hard dependency then Red Hat will be in control of strategy for the dominant init system.

That's what concerns me, not the immediate technical challenges which can overcome. But those who are busy now patching the broken bits won't have influence over the direction of systemd in the future.

We'll all go where one billion-dollar enterprise-oriented vendor leads us.

digi_owl3• 12 years ago

This came to mind:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/linus-...

The reason is that RH right now is deep in two camps, cloud and military/government contracts.

http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/techflash/2014/09/u...

and systemd has two parts as best i can tell.

One part is aimed at cloud via containers and sandboxes (soon to come to desktop as well via Gnome).

The other is aimed at securing "seats" via logind. This because the earlier consolekit had a limited reach because it didn't have a partner sitting as pid 1.

And the military is after all the origin of the concept "trusted computing".

I am not saying that there is a willed conspiracy. But with Red Hat being a for profit organization, anything that bring in the cash in the short run will be given priority...

rogertux2• 12 years ago

They have fear of systemd becoming the mainstream init system. It's more easy for a project to become obsolete if we start to forget about it. Although sysvinit still has an chance to evolve.

gtaylor• 12 years ago

Although sysvinit still has an chance to evolve.

You'd probably have some of the same people complaining if you tried to "evolve" SysV.

I guess things are pretty good right now in the Linux world if this is the thing to argue over.

rogertux2• 12 years ago

Well... In fact it's alredy happening with the init wars

e762011• 12 years ago

Not really, remember daemontools? There are almost a hundred init systems very superior technically compared to sysv and systemd, the truth is that sysv has NEVER been considered the best.

digi_owl3• 12 years ago

Depends on how it was to evolve.

Parallel boot, sure. But you can always drop runit or openrc or something similar on top and get it already.

socket based service start, (hardware) event based, pass.

Frankly the core of sysv, the init binary, does very little. It sets up virtual terminals and fires up one or more processes (that it will keep an eye on and maybe restart).

The latter processe(s), most commonly a shell script of some kind, are what do the actual starting of "services" and managing of runlevels etc.

This is a very flexible system, as most of the logic involved is easy to get at. It is housed in interpreted scripts rather than compiled C code.

you can even run the scripts directly in a root shell if you have the need to do so (or perform the scripted commands manually).

Basically the scripts do little more than what someone would do manually if they were presented with a bare shell after kernel boot.

Alupis6• 12 years ago

not to mention all of the good things systemd actually provides.

I'm particularly excited about socket activation for my servers, as well as auto-remounting of network shares if connectivity is lost (my laptop on/off wifi or traveling, etc).

I really don't get the systemd "hate" that is still floating around. It seems a lot of arguments against end up boiling down to "it's different and therefore I don't want it". systemd is a collection of smaller tools, which is the UNIX philosophy (debunking that argument). It can be replaced as per this article and if software projects don't explicitly bake in hard-dependencies (but even then there are ways around it like shims and what-not that several people have built).

Distros are looking around at all the available init systems, and a large amount are deciding systemd offers something more than the rest, and then going with it. (you can review the debian debate for gritty and technical details). There really is no reason to be so angry at systemd.

deong4• 12 years ago

As another article I read just today pointed out (in a completely different context), the point of Unix isn't the number or size of the tools. It's the composability of the tools.

systemd might be a collection of many small tools, but they don't compose well. Dbus isn't a substitute for piping little blobs of text between stdin and stdout of a bunch of different programs that are utterly agnostic of each other's existence.

And systemd might well be great. Aesthetically, I don't care much for it, but I'm using it with no problems, so I guess it's fine. But it's not "the Unix philosophy".

thevdude• 12 years ago

Systemd is great. I've used sockets for ssh, I use the timers instead of cron, everything goes smoothly and works really well.

I don't get the hate, I love it.

vertex-four• 12 years ago

"it's different and therefore I don't want it"

The argument is really that given that systemd as a project does a hell of a lot, it's actually really hard to replace bits of it - as people who are trying to are quickly finding out, there's a few dependency trees for various components which end up requiring that systemd manages most layers of the system. So you either use all of systemd, or as little of it as possible.

According to Lennart Poettering himself, udev is going to end up depending on systemd being the init system. udev! It'll be damn near impossible to replace systemd then. (And anybody who wants to use anything else, or even have the choice to use anything else, is a "systemd-hater".)

regularfry2• 12 years ago

systemd is a collection of smaller tools, which is the UNIX philosophy (debunking that argument).

That's not debunked. The small tools of the UNIX philosophy are supposed to compose well with others. If I want to replace systemd's init with that from daemontools (for instance) and keep the rest of systemd working, that should be possible.

Or let's suppose that I want to opt in to systemd's auto-remounting and socket activation (for instance), but for whatever reason I need to keep my syslogs as text on disc, so I can't use systemd's binary logs but need my legacy syslog system. Can I do that?

I really don't get the systemd "hate" that is still floating around. It seems a lot of arguments against end up boiling down to "it's different and therefore I don't want it".

The arguments I've heard boil down to "it's badly designed and therefore I don't want it."

xorcist• 12 years ago

There are a lot of reasonable criticisms about the systemd family of utilities. I am very skeptical to the utility of binary logging for example. It makes an effort to guarantee integrity but does not make any guarantees and is useless in the face of an adversary.

I also have a suspicion there is a more friendly way do what PolicyKit provides, which is not at all very transparent to an administrator. You could easily trust software with privileges without realizing it. There are also concerns about the hard dependency on these utilities for GNOME, but I don't use it myself so I don't know if the concerns are valid or not.

I believe however most of the criticism centered on how udev was dropped as a separate utility, despite concerns from other developers, and the way people who tried to keep feature parity in a stand alone fork was treated. They was basically told they were regarded as downstream developers.

This is mostly water under the bridge now of course, but it makes cooperation a lot harder than it should be.

cesarb• 12 years ago

I really don't get the systemd "hate" that is still floating around.

I found a message that might shed some light on it:

"[...] Let me turn your question around: we swapped out one of the most central pieces of Linux systems, one of the pieces that is probably the most core of what administrators interface with every day. How could this change ever have gone without any noise?"

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-Oct... (read the whole message, it's quite interesting).

toni• 12 years ago

apt-pinning (something that I have always thought is a bad practice) and using a shim. Honest question: isn't this just a giant hairy hack? Am I missing something?

stonogo• 12 years ago

apt pinning, like most systems administration software, is a bad thing if applied without forethought. while I withhold judgment on this particular application, apt pinning is a very useful feature when dealing with e.g. proprietary binary software with specific library version requirements, for instance.

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

Pinning? That's only a hack if you don't care to learn how apt works. And not actually necessary to avoid systemd unless you're running with `--assume-yes` or hammering 'y'.

systemd-shim? Well, yeah, but that's the entire point of it's existence.

doe88• 12 years ago

I think the author should refrain from using the word trolls so much it hampers his overall message.

So what happens with the pinning example with GNOME (I didn't know this useful command)? Because of the dependance on systemd it is not upgraded then?

db48x• 12 years ago

There have been some real hate-filled messages on the mailing lists. If they had been directed at a women then they would have made HN all on their own. The article links to one of them, if you want to check it out.

lawl• 12 years ago

For the record, the guy on the mailing list linked in the article probably has serious mental health issues.

He also does those really creepy youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2toVPMHRo8M

And I've heard he contacted other devs and I've heard a couple of stories that I'm not sure I can share publicly at this point.

Generalizing that all systemd opponents are trolls because there is one guy with serious mental health issues is not a valid argument.

e762011• 12 years ago

Here is the message:

There has been no General Resolution amongst debian package maintainers. Red Hat has instituted a regulatory capture of the "bug squashing" committee within debian (the "Technical Committee") by having current or former (but stock holding) employees moonlight in debian and gradually gain membership in that comittie.

Once their numbers were sufficient they proceeded to file a bug report on the fact that systemd was not standard in debian.

This is illicit abuse of process and they need to be prosecuted.

Debian is an unincorporated association. It has bylaws, trade practices, and dealings by which it was governed. The RedHat associated members of the Technical Committee have illegally and in bad faith abused their positions in-order to realize financial and strategic gain for their employer.

Do you really believe this is hate speech? Hate speech attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation.

ultramancool4• 12 years ago

Indeed, I've went off on some anti-systemd rants, simply based on its design philsophy, but all I ever wanted was init-system flexibility. I'm just glad to see that Debian has went in the right direction with this, rather than enforced a lock-in as has been previously suggested and may be the case on many other distributions.

RexRollman• 12 years ago

Would you like your Debian with Unix or Windows flavoring? ;)

Seriously though, I am not really sure how I feel about this. While systemd obviously has benefits, I just can't shake the feeling that it goes against the Unix paradiam. But then again, I also prefer xterms and a window manager over a desktop environments like KDE, Xfce, and Gnome, so maybe that explains my mixed feelings.

byuu• 12 years ago

Thanks for the guide. Serious question, say I were to do a clean install of Jessie. I would use Xfce with either LightDM or no DM, or I might choose to set up a VPS that obviously won't even need Xorg. Is there a way during installation that I can skip installing systemd at all in that case, perhaps through a minimal install and then following up with adding the software I want? I don't like the idea of trying to purge systemd and its dependencies after a fresh install.

tkinom• 12 years ago

Love to see a simple Linux dist that is base on xfce or some supper lightweight GUI as default but base on debian also.

Any good suggestion?

VLM3• 12 years ago

Debian, then at the "task selection" stage choose nothing (definitely not desktop environment), later install xmonad and trayer and all that. Or you want xfce, OK install that. Oh and probably lightdm or xdm or some login manager, assuming you don't want to log in text and then startx or whatever other strategy.

Its not like Debian "requires" gnome or kde or whatever as part of the install. Just install what you want.

gh02t• 12 years ago

I am not sure about Jessie, but whenever Debian switches to Systemd as the default, I would guess even the minimal install would have it. Systemd is the init process, so you can't really just do without it (or some other init system at least). I think it will probably require somebody remixing the installer image to use a different init system.

Not sure though, I'm not super informed about what Debian is planning for the switch.

I think (no experience, but it makes sense) that Gentoo lets you pick the init system easily at install, you might want to look at that.

You might want to try it though. In my experience, the minimal config for systemd is quite lightweight and clean. I don't use KDE or Gnome, but I quite like systemd on my Arch workstation. Arch (and Fedora) have had it for quite a while now, even back when it was probably a bad idea to switch...

icebraining• 12 years ago

The netinstall (not sure about the others) lets you choose exactly what packages you want during the installation, including init system, as far as I know.

steanne• 12 years ago

i thought xfce required systemd-logind?

edwintorok• 12 years ago

It just Recommends:libpam-systemd, its not a strict dependency. If I try to do an 'apt-get remove systemd systemd-shim' it doesn't show that it would remove XFCE. I'm on KDE now though so I haven't checked how well xfce works without systemd. KDE itself works quite well with systemd-shim.

lotsofcows• 12 years ago

Oh great, now people whose opinions differ are "trolls". I think we all know who the troll is...

general_failure• 12 years ago

Yeah, this appears like a gross misuse of the world trolls

chimeracoder2• 12 years ago

He's not casting all opponents of systemd as trolls; he's saying that trolls have spread a lot of misinformation about systemd, which is true.

Opponents of systemd have spread a LOT of FUD and misinformation about systemd. I know, because I was initially very skeptical of (or even opposed to) systemd based on what they had said. Fortunately, I discovered that much of it was misleading or inaccurate after my main distro switched to systemd.

Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and say that it wasn't an intentional attempt to spread misinformation, and that they were simply speaking very vocally about a topic that they themselves had not taken the time to read up on, it is not much of a stretch to call that behavior "trolling".

e762011• 12 years ago

Opponents of systemd have spread a LOT of FUD and misinformation about systemd

Well, obviously there's another, more charitable interpretation.

I discovered that much of it was misleading or inaccurate after my main distro switched to systemd.

Systemd is a continuously-varying project, and just because your distro smoothly switched, doesn't mean there were no problems for early adopters. Or that just because your configuration works, no difficulty with the multiple systemd components have, do or will arise.

pb2au• 12 years ago

While it may not be much of a stretch, it still hampers his point. If the goal is to convince an audience of people who are evaluating the technical aspects of systemd that there is a viable alternative to using it, the continued reference to the less-than-polite demeanor of many detractors isn't helping to further his point.

As well, many (most?) people associate "trolling" with "intentional griefing" and not "willful ignorance". I believe that many of the people arguing against systemd are either ill-informed or only considering their own use-cases, but I don't think it is appropriate to generalize them as trolls if their goal is something other than "to make people angry".

baldfat• 12 years ago

I really think he is thinking FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) equals trolls. Which is wrong.

"Don't listen to the FUD" # Fixes the first sentence

I can understand that feeling when ideas and chooses are not based on the same as your own. The whole Mono is evil was the definition of FUD to me and not based on the presented facts. To me the issue was mono and C# was a language that was already was a standard and that we had public confirmation that M$ would not do anything to anyone using mono. BUT I would be hard to call people who don't believe like me that SystemD is easier as a user or that Mono was a great choice of a language. I think society is based on what do we do to those who believe differently then ourselves.

pjc50• 12 years ago

'Troll' is basically now a useless word as it's been used to mean too many different things.

Karunamon2• 12 years ago

Now? No, not really, just avoid GNOME.

In the future? Yeah, probably.

This wouldn't be an issue if the systemd people weren't notoriously hard to get along with. Really, I think all of the reasons why systemd attracts hate can be boiled down to this. Nobody wants a standard init system that's overtly hostile to bug reports and reasonable changes.

Say what you want about upstart and sysvinit, but I don't recall a point where the maintainers of it were told off for hijacking kernel flags...

morganvachon4• 12 years ago

This wouldn't be an issue if the systemd people weren't notoriously hard to get along with.

This. It doesn't help this guy's case that he's basically calling anyone who doesn't want systemd a "troll". That's not the way to win people to your side of a disagreement.

Aissen2• 12 years ago

This.

This. Backed by nothing, calling the systemd team "notoriously hard to get along with". I'd be interested in seeing proof of "this".

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

As well as upower (though it still works with ConsoleKit as fallback, I think), udisks2, the Weston compositor and some other programs. Binary distros also have some pretty skewed dependency chains on systemd for packages where it's inessential.

It'll only grow, though. Most certainly.

e762011• 12 years ago

It'll only grow, though. Most certainly.

Only up to a point. Systemd is getting too bloated, and software engineering tells us that the effort to maintain this will grow exponentially.

So we have two options: if systemd improves and decides to follow UNIX principles, good. Otherwise it'll be replaced like consolekit et al. It's great that we have so many init systems to choose from. The only problem now is software that hard depends on systemd when a single line of code could avoid that.

xfs2• 12 years ago

Core package bsdutils predepends on libsystemd0. Now it is impossible for any Debian jessie systems to be without systemd code.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/bsdutils

geofft3• 12 years ago

That's moving the goalposts in a significant way. Debian has always been of the philosophy that binaries that have runtime-optional support for something link libsomething and have a dependency on it, but there cannot generally be a dependency from libsomething to the actual something package.

For instance, openssh-client depends on libgssapi-krb5-2 and libselinux1, but neither of those packages have a dependency on the Kerberos 5 userspace clients or on SELinux being configured or enabled, respectively. If you happen to install Kerberos or enable SELinux, then openssh-client will work fine without a recompile (because Debian doesn't have USE flags). If you don't, the libraries will just do nothing. I think SELinux is a terrible and misguided idea that subverts the UNIX philosophy, adds needless complexity, and also doesn't work, but I have no objection to libselinux1 being installed.

Same thing with bsdutils and libsystemd0. The discussion has never been about being "without systemd code" as if it were a noxious poison. (It's free software, I would _hope_ people incorporate good code from it into other packages.) It's about being without systemd, the init system, and if bsdutils did depend on a particular init system, it would be flagrantly in violation of the Technical Committee resolution.

scarygliders• 12 years ago

Yep. You noticed that too. I found this out by trying to remove all traces of systemd from my Jessie/Sid installation, found out that I couldn't get rid of libsystemd0 because bsdutils depends on it. That's the same bsdutils that you can't really do without.

It's almost as if systemd was being forced upon you no matter what.

lomnakkus• 12 years ago

Now? No, not really, just avoid GNOME.

You don't have to. Someone apparently implemented the logind interface(!) so that GNOME could function on non-systemd systems. Just use that.

This wouldn't be an issue if the systemd people weren't notoriously hard to get along with. [...]

Are you kidding? I've been following along the mailing list for at least two years and I've never seen any of the unreasonableness you claim. (I'm not in any way connected or invested in the systemd project, just as a little disclaimer.)

If you're going to pull this stunt please at least give us concrete references.

Say what you want about upstart and sysvinit, but I don't recall a point where the maintainers of it were told off for hijacking kernel flags...

Ah, I see. You're just another troll recycling talking points. Oh, well.

Oh, and btw: Complain all you want -- in F/OSS the people doing the work get to decide. Deal.

JdeBP• 12 years ago

No-one has yet come forward publicly with a working second implementation of logind for Linux. The only person known to be working on a second implementation of logind is targetting OpenBSD. To use logind-API-client desktop environments with the well-known systemd-shim actually involves using the logind that is part of the systemd package, running on top of a daemon that implements only part of an internal systemd API. See http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/de...

anonbanker• 12 years ago

another pro-systemd post. there's been two of them today, the other being the uselessd blog post. What's with this community rushing to defend themselves? doesn't this smell like astroturfing to anyone else?

alex_duf• 12 years ago

On a purely technical perspective (I don't care about people not getting along), what is reproached to systemd ?

Avoiding systemd isn't hard

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