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Greybeard-built Debian fork bringing init freedom on track for early 2017 release
The self-proclaimed "Veteran Unix Admins" forking Debian in the name of init freedom have released Beta 2 of their "Devuan" Linux distribution.
Devuan came about after some users felt it had become too desktop-friendly. The change the greybeards objected to most was the decision to replace sysvinit init with systemd, a move felt to betray core Unix principles of user choice and keeping bloat to a bare minimum.
Supporters of init freedom also dispute assertions that systemd is in all ways superior to sysvinit init, arguing that Debian ignored viable alternatives like sinit, openrc, runit, s6 and shepherd. All are therefore included in Devuan.
-- submitted from IRC
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systemd Free Linux Distro Devuan Releases Second Beta
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(Score: 2) by fritsd on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:52PM
Yeah, I think I said it wrong. From a wrong perspective.
udev is not critical, in the sense that your server will boot fine without it, if you have a simple disk layout.
If your root filesystem is an encrypted filesystem on an LVM2 logical volume on a RAID 5 array, then your initramfs has to do a lot of complicated stuff before the final root filesystem is available for booting from.
I think this includes creating new device inodes when they become available (e.g. after mdadm has assembled a RAID array). I don't actually know if it would work to
mount /dev/md0 /
if the kernel would somehow try to assemble the /dev/md0 raid itself from its component partitions' metadata (which are the component partitions??). I haven't studied the code, but I think the mdadm userspace program does that.
Now that I have read "man 4 md" I'm doubting.
For people like me who use Linux as a workstation with a GUI (most of the time), it's nice that you can plug in USB stuff and have it working. That's an important function of udev. And when you plug in a USB device it adds new hardware
(the system couldn't know before what you were going to plug in).
I've had to modify some udev rules to get my mobile phone recognized so that I can access it with adb (Android development) as non-root. So it's a program to regulate user access to hardware.
From my perspective, which is a really odd and uncommon perspective (sorry), udev was "critical" because it was a big log in the systemd "log-jam" [wikipedia.org] of dependencies in the low-level base Debian system.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:29PM
If your root filesystem is an encrypted filesystem on an LVM2 logical volume on a RAID 5 array, then your initramfs has to do a lot of complicated stuff before the final root filesystem is available for booting from.
The man page for udev says it's for "dynamic device management." Your example isn't dynamic. The grey-beard way was mknod, perhaps run from a /dev/MAKEDEV script.