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posted by martyb on Friday February 08 2019, @05:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-all-geek-to-me dept.

https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/

LWN (Linux Weekly News) provides a written account of Benno Rice's talk. The former FreeBSD core developer gives some context around systemd and what FreeBSD should learn from it. He compares the affair to a Greek tragedy which contains much suffering followed by catharsis. His attitude toward systemd is generally not negative, but I won't cherry-pick any specific sections; you'll have to actually read the article for once.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday February 08 2019, @05:50AM (21 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @05:50AM (#798192) Journal

    The summary above is way off. His is a propaganda piece. He was there at LCA to sing the praises of system's talking points not criticize it. It's not even an init system, as he pretends.

    The guy is a systemd booster making the Linux and BSD conference circuit in praise of systemd and how the equivalent should be brought into the BSDs, or at least FreeBSD. He says nothing more or less than what Poettering and his crowd have been bleating for years. However, he does deliver their logic-free talking points [blogspot.com] with a pleasant tone of voice, a soft smile, and without the condescending attitude of Poettering. So those that pay attention to tone rather than content are quite fooled.

    There are also videos:

    The gist:

    1. Newer is better
    2. Frequent use of straw men
    3. False dichotomy between systemd omg now,now,now,hurry or SysV init forevermore
    4. Personal attacks on anyone not praising systemd

    He knows darn well what he is saying is false. For him, he also did the FreeBSD CoC, the tragedy appears to be his disappointment that it has not yet been adopted in FreeBSD.

    --
    Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:01AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:01AM (#798205)

    And one of his points is basically, "If you haven't implemented something like PulseAudio or SystemD yourself, you aren't qualified to criticize it."

    Which seems unfair, because of course I haven't implemented a SystemD-alike. I may well be incapable, but I haven't tried because I think it's a bad idea. Why would I write something stupid just to get an 'argument from authority' foot in the door to be allowed to have an opinion? I have implemented plenty of other useful stuff that worked just fine, and you've never heard of me because nothing I wrote pissed off legions of people. Let me know when Poettering can say as much, and I'll listen to his opinion.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday February 08 2019, @07:38AM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @07:38AM (#798212) Journal

      And one of his points is basically, "If you haven't implemented something like PulseAudio or SystemD yourself, you aren't qualified to criticize it."

      One of the counter metaphors to his assertion, from the early stages of systemd infestation, is to point out that one does not need to be a baker to know whether bread is stale.

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
    • (Score: 5, Touché) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @07:41AM (1 child)

      by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:41AM (#798214) Journal

      "If you haven't implemented something like PulseAudio or SystemD yourself, you aren't qualified to criticize it."

      I like that line of reasoning. The pope can't speak about marriage. You can't speak about your pal doing crack cocaine. "if you haven't been aborted you aren't qualified to criticize it".

      --
      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Saturday February 09 2019, @04:22AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 09 2019, @04:22AM (#798700) Journal

        "if you haven't been aborted you aren't qualified to criticize it".

        Excellent advice. If only I were qualified to listen to it!

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:01AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:01AM (#798235)

      Yesterday I spent over an hour bashing my head against systemd.
      I suspect those who wrote it saw Microsoft tech, thought it was good, and tried to make their own.

      It's just frustrating. Annoying.

      If you care, I have got to the point of rebooting the computer to see if that magically fixes whatever the frick is wrong. Ffs.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:56PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:56PM (#798308)

      And one of his points is basically, "If you haven't implemented something like PulseAudio or SystemD yourself, you aren't qualified to criticize it."

      I've installed PulseAudio and it made my sound not work and it was impossible to diagnose the problem. I had to wait for my system to update and then it magically worked again. I would not trust the same development team with my boot system.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday February 08 2019, @07:58AM (8 children)

    by pTamok (3042) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:58AM (#798222)

    I was going to write something similar, but modded you up instead. I'm interested in systemd, and had hoped that it would be an informative talk, taking an unbiased view of the arguments put forward both by proponents of systemd, and its detractors. It was neither, bring mostly a content free puff piece.

    There are reasons to believe systemd is a good thing. There are also well-founded criticisms. Part of the reasons systemd came about was because many people found the then existing init systems to be deficient for their needs. As a result different groups came up with different proposals that addressed their needs with things like OpenRC (addresses problems with startup dependencies), Upstart (an event-based init system), and Runit (and extremely minimal init system), and of course MacOS's launchd. systemd was one 'colour' in a spectrum of init systems each of which addressed the most salient problems of differing groups of users.

    systemd was adopted as the Red Hat distribution's choice of init, and was controverisally chosen to be a most-favoured-among-equals init system for the Debian distribution. As a large number of Linux distributions base themselves off these two 'core' distributions, it meant that a very large number of distributions now used systemd as their init. This set of events did not suit all people, and some have been very vocal about their misgivings with this course of events. Others can point out reasons why systemd does not suit them, often in quite deep technical detail.

    Two large criticisms of systemd are: that the circumstances around its adoption have made it difficult to choose other init systems - it has, de facto, reduced choice; and that it tries to do too much - while it is not monolithic as many critics claim, it does integrate a lot of different capabilities in different modules that were not historically regarded as being within an init system's purview - and in trying to do too much, it fails in unexpected ways.

    It does not help that the lead author of systemd is a 'Marmite' personality - some people like his approach very much, others find it unconscionable. A mixture of arguing over arcane technical points and oil-and-water personality clashes has not made the discussions easy.

    My 'daily driver' PC uses systemd, and it hasn't caused me many problems. I get entries in my logs showing errors in shutdowns which cannot be resolved - the bug is not a WONTFIX, but the systemd programmers don't see any prospect of fixing it in the near term. My PC has enough resources not to need the minimalist approach of runit. On the other hand, I use OpenWrt in other devices where systemd would not be appropriate - so I am in favour of having an easy choice of init systems (and associated software). As more and more software makes the assumption that the facilities offered by systemd are available, preserving that valuable choice for when systemd is not appropriate is important to me, and to a minority of other GNU/Linux users.

    I could talk for a couple of hours about systemd and criticise some of the choices made in its design and implementation, but it is not 'garbage' - it has does have some really good ideas. However, the (almost) monoculture it has engendered is not, for me, a positive development.

    I was hoping this advertised talk would take a measured view of systemd's benefits, point out where it appears to have gone wrong (in the presenter's opinion), and offer some suggestions on how things could be improved in future. My expectations were not met.

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:38AM (6 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:38AM (#798242)

      You should probably read up on what monolithic actually means.. see for instance the fallacy post linked by MadTinfoilHatter elsewhere in these comments.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday February 08 2019, @10:30AM (5 children)

        by pTamok (3042) on Friday February 08 2019, @10:30AM (#798253)

        I know what monolithic means, and no, I don't think that systemd was sculpted from a single piece of stone.

        I have read the blog entry you linked to: Jude C. Nelson - 2014-09-26 - Systemd: The Biggest Fallacies [blogspot.com], and specifically the section labelled: "Fallacy #1: "Systemd is multiple binaries, therefore it is not monolithic" and I agree with it. Jude does not say systemd is monolithic. He says:

        Now, "modular vs non-modular" and "monolithic vs non-monolithic" are continuous trade-offs. Systemd is less monolithic and more modular than, say, the "ls" program. But it is more monolithic than any of the non-monolithic examples above, due to the inter-binary logical coupling they exhibit.

        He points out why some of the modularity of systemd is unhelpful, or at least, difficult to take advantage of, so for practical purposes, it may as well be monolithic. But to characterise systemd as 'monolithic' without explaining the nuances behind how you might classify the availability of, but the simultaneous inutility of its modules leaves you open to the criticism of not understanding systemd. For some purposes it way as well be monolithic, but when arguing the point it is necessary to be accurate.

        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday February 08 2019, @12:14PM (4 children)

          by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @12:14PM (#798263) Journal

          From a system administration perspective, you have a monolith on your hands with systemd. Try swapping out journald or timesyncd, to pick two out of several dozen services in that systemd tarbaby. As a system administrator or home user, you should be able to swap out timesyncd for OpenNTP or NTPd, but that's not possible.

          So from an end-user or even a system administration perspective, systemd is a monolith. Sure the distro packagers have a little leeway in which to pick and choose but not so much really. Even then how many, even among those of us who can, are willing to roll their own distro just to remove a component from systemd? It's not going to happen.

          Letting them continue to lie about it being an init system doesn't help the debate. It just obfuscates the problem.

          --
          Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
          • (Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday February 08 2019, @01:27PM (1 child)

            by pTamok (3042) on Friday February 08 2019, @01:27PM (#798278)

            I see and agree with your point.

            However, in saying "systemd is a monolith", it allows those with a differing point of view to yours to point out that (technically) you are wrong and imply that (a) you have not investigated in sufficient depth and (b) that being wrong on such an easy point calls into question your judgement on other items.

            Asking for a stable API between the dozens of binaries that make up the systemd 'ecosystem' would be a reasonable request. Explain why the InterfaceStabilityPromise [freedesktop.org] is either incomplete or not relevant, and the same for the InterfacePortabilityAndStabilityChart [freedesktop.org].

            I know that many people find systemd's position incompatible with their requirements, but rather than just saying "it's monolithic", it really is necessary to expose just why the systemd approach causes the problems complained about. E.g. if you want or need to use a different login manager, why that is so difficult, and the consequences of various desktop environments assuming that you are using systemd.

            Don't get me wrong, I am no systemd fan, but when proponents of systemd can appear to knock down the arguments of detractors so easily, it behoves the critics to make better arguments - or agree that the systemd people are, in fact, correct.

            So systemd is not, in fact, monolithic, and it has a Interface Stability Promise. How and why is that misleading? If you cannot answer that clearly and concisely so that non-experts can understand, then perhaps some research is necessary.

            Note: if you are a software maintainer, and 90% of your users use systemd, and keeping the other 10% of your users happy will require 30% of your effort, what would you do? You can understand why preserving non-systemd choices is difficult. It is easier to just go with the flow (Those numbers are not backed up with data, but given as an example). This is why Debian choosing not to require maintainers to support a choice of inits has been so corrosive. Non-systemd choices have fallen into desuetude, quite understandably, even if regrettably.

            I sometimes wonder if systemd will, eventually, cause a fork of the kernel. Linus won't be around forever.

            • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:25PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:25PM (#798491)

              If geeks are supposed to be more meritocratic and fairer minded, the debate, and particularly the tone of it, over systemd calls that notion into question. I have not cared to personally undertake a deep investigation down to the level of reading the source, of systemd vs upstart vs runit vs sysV vs whatever. I have other technical interests I prefer to spend my limited time upon. So I have to rely upon others for analysis. It's irritating to be constantly trolled with what purports to be another somewhat analytic and unbiased piece about init systems and systemd in particular, only to find it's fluff and puff.

              My own bad experience with systemd was when Arch Linux switched to it. The manner in which they did it was terrible. How much of that was the fault of systemd is hard to say. Anyway, to update Arch during that switch, I had to enter many complicated command line instructions one after another, over a period of a few months. I feared if it didn't let up, eventually a mistake, maybe mine, or maybe with the commands, would screw up the system. And that's exactly what happened some 6 weeks into the gradual switchover. Left me with an unbootable system, and the easiest way forward was a reinstall, which I did. Stuck with Arch when I reinstalled.

              The crap Arch did was pretty bad. /var/log/syslog disappeared without notice. What they should have done was at least leave a text file at /var/log/syslog with a short explanation to redirect the administrator to the new journalctl command. Instead, I had to hunt around for an explanation of what had changed and what to do now to read the logs. Then, journalctl turned out to be a lot, lot slower, because they'd defaulted to a compressed binary log. Every time the admin needed to read the last few lines of the log, the setup imposed a long delay (5 seconds at least, even saw delays of 30 seconds) to decompress the whole log file, where before "tail /var/log/syslog" was practically instantaneous. I think Arch Linux has restored /var/log/syslog, but that was enough for me. I didn't stick around for it, I changed distros.

              The Arch Linux people were also high handed and arrogant about the change, another factor in my decision to move on to a different distro. Basically told me to shut up, I didn't know what I was talking about, the decision had been made. Love it, or leave it. So I left. That attitude has infected most of the debates I've seen about systemd.

          • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 08 2019, @08:09PM

            by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday February 08 2019, @08:09PM (#798519) Homepage Journal

            I think I'll just stick with Gentoo or Gentoo-based distros. You don't get a modular pick and choose of components but you do get to decide if you want it or don't want it and you don't have to give up much of anything if you decide you'd rather go OpenRC as they do a pretty good job of unfucking packages that have decided systemd should be a requirement.

            --
            My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10 2019, @08:23AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10 2019, @08:23AM (#799040)

            > Try swapping out journald or timesyncd, to pick two out of several dozen services in that systemd tarbaby.

            That's trivial:

            systemctl disable systemd-timesyncd; systemctl stop systemd-timesyncd

            Then install ntpd or whatever you want as an alternative.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 08 2019, @10:52AM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday February 08 2019, @10:52AM (#798255) Homepage Journal

      They only reason that I personally am opposed to systemd is that applications that have nothing to do with initialization are using systemd as a platform, rather than using existing platforms as as GTK or Qt.

      Android has the very _same_ problem, in that Android Apps are written to the very same kind of Vendor Lock-In Platform as "The Java Platform".

      It happens that I still own the very same first edition of what at the time was called "The Java Programming Language". It was after Bjarne pointed out the Java is not a programming language but a platform that I abandoned Java entirely. That same book is not called "The Java Platform"; there are Enterprise Editions of that book, books on The Java Platform's Performance - which contrary to you sorry lots assertions, doubtlessly is _quite_ good provided you're A Member Of The Borg Collective - with at first every mention of Java, its Platform or there ilk being at one time being liberally sprinkled with TMs or Rs or what have you, whether they were of Sun Microsystems or are now those of Oracle Corporation.

      But I digress:

      I'm quite good at writing technical articles [soggywizards.com]. I can't start until Saturday or so, but being at work were the Internet is speedy, I'll download the ISOs for both CentOS and Debian, then dig into systemd's source.

      That technical article will _not_ be an opinion piece! Rather it will be a sober discussion of systemd's merits and deficits. Let me place A Link Into The Future:

      It happens that I think the macOS' - lower case "m" - launchd is the very best thing since sliced bread; it's a a true joy for me both as a Mac - uppercase - developer and as a Mac User. So in my infinite free time, I'll do my very best to write a truly unbiased and non-puff comparison of launchd's good and bad features.

      (ProTip: most of what most people find the very most annoying about macOS can be completely disabled by a command like "launchctl disable annoyingfeature'. For me personally, that's iTunes perpetually launching when I connect to my BT speakers, when I only ever use VLC. However I have yet to Lift A Finger to disable the relevant launch daemon.)

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @12:44PM

    by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @12:44PM (#798271) Journal

    You know a piece of software is really bad when the guy boosting it calls it "a tragedy".

    --
    Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:08PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:08PM (#798317)

    Don't worry.

    IBM bought Redhat to redeem itself, for years of .. well, being IBM.

    They're going to fire Pottering, and remove all the silly from systemd. They are.

    Honest. Please?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:18PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:18PM (#798323)

      They may drop SystemD and add the odm.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 08 2019, @03:51PM (1 child)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @03:51PM (#798350) Journal

      Maybe Red Hat and all distributions based on it will morph into A/UX.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @11:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @11:47PM (#798595)

        or Xenix.