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Systemd introduces "Portable Services"

posted by mrpg on Wednesday May 30 2018, @12:10AM   
from the one-process-to-rule-them-all dept.

mechanicjay writes:

Systemd Introduces "Portable Services" Functionality, Similar To Containers

Lennart is at it again, making complicated things that nobody asked for.

The past several months Lennart Poettering has been working on a "portable services" concept and that big ticket new feature has now landed in Systemd. Portable services are akin to containers but different.

[...] A portable service is ultimately just an OS tree, either inside of a directory tree, or inside a raw disk image containing a Linux file system. This tree is called the "image". It can be "attached" or "detached" from the system. When "attached" specific systemd units from the image are made available on the host system, then behaving pretty much exactly like locally installed system services. When "detached" these units are removed again from the host, leaving no artifacts around (except maybe messages they might have logged).

[...] The primary focus use-case of "portable services" is to extend the host system with encapsulated extensions, but provide almost full integration with the rest of the system, though possibly restricted by effective security knobs. This focus includes system extensions otherwise sometimes called "super-privileged containers".

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Original Submission

• Oh Boy... Oh Boy... (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @02:03AM (5 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @02:03AM (#686041)

  So glad that there are now a good number of non-systemd distros to choose from.

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• Re:Oh Boy... Re:Oh Boy... (Score: 3, Insightful) by moondrake on Wednesday May 30 2018, @02:27PM (4 children)

  by moondrake (2658) on Wednesday May 30 2018, @02:27PM (#686277)

  are there really?

  I would like to have a bleeding edge distro, preferably a rolling release, and packages (either in distro or via 3rd party repos) most obscure things that are out there.
  I would think maybe gentoo, but I hear not that much positive about it recently (and i prefer I can install a package, rather than compile it, otherwise i would not want a distro where nearly everything is available as package already).

  Apart from arch, ubuntu, fedora and OpenSuse, I have not tried many distros. Does something exist similar to these but without systemd?

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  • Re:Oh Boy... Re:Oh Boy... (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @02:38PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @02:38PM (#686281)

    Try Void Linux. Azuma Hazuki did a review in her journal [soylentnews.org]. Void Linux arm64 also seems to work great on a Raspberry Pi; I found Void on Distrowatch looking for an arm64 non-systemd distro. I used it for about a week until I felt brave enough to give an arm64 Gentoo install a try (only arm32 is/was well supported on Gentoo).

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    • Re:Oh Boy... (Score: 1) by Deeo Kain on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:13PM

      by Deeo Kain (5848) on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:13PM (#686768)

      Are you aware of this about Void Linux?

      https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/16/contributing_to_keep_small_linux_alive/ [theregister.co.uk]

      Other Void Linux developers recently took to the project's website to say they have "had no contact with [the main developer] since the end of January, and no meaningful contact for well over a year". Though that's bad, it wouldn't be the end of the world except that the main developer is the only one with the ability to manage much of Void's infrastructure, including the Void Linux GitHub account, IRC channels and domains.

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  • Re:Oh Boy... Re:Oh Boy... (Score: 2) by DarkMorph on Wednesday May 30 2018, @10:53PM (1 child)

    by DarkMorph (674) on Wednesday May 30 2018, @10:53PM (#686528)

    Visiting the without-systemd website is the quickest way to discover a long list of operating systems (Linux, BSD, and others) that do not use systemd. Of course systemd is irrelevant outside of Linux, but it is good to have a more thorough list. Some of the more significant Linux distros that come to mind are Gentoo, Devuan, Slackware, Alpine, and Void. I am curious what "not that much positive about it recently" is about regarding Gentoo, whose Portage is perhaps the most powerful package manager in the Linux landscape. The only gripe I have right now is the lack of staff to work on the Portage tree. (It's noticeable on GitHub how many PRs age a bit before they're finally merged in. Official reviewers and devs so short-handed that simply spoon-feeding patches and contributions are backlogged! Fortunately this seems to only be true for extraneous packages not relevant to the core system. There is plenty of attention for the heart of the package tree.) If you want to balance between the leverage Gentoo offers you and offloading some of the necessity to compile things, Calculate Linux might be for you, as it ships default binary packages in the tree that helps you cut down on compiling.
    
    Personally, given how powerful personal computers' CPUs have become, I can say the number of packages I actually have a problem with spontaneously compiling on a whim due to their compile times, I can count on one hand.
    
    And I think it's worth noting that the distros that do not supply systemd by default (or at all) often supply the choice of init system. Which is how it should be, by all distros. It would be far more acceptable, I'm sure, had distros such as Debian simply maintained the option of switching the init system rather than forcing just the one.

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    • Re:Oh Boy... (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @06:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @06:21PM (#686859)

      > It would be far more acceptable, I'm sure, had distros such as Debian simply maintained the option of switching the init system rather than forcing just the one.

      One can just install sysvinit in Debian if wanted.

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