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from the all-your-computer-are-belong-to-us dept.
At the All Systems Go conference in Berlin 20-22 September, Lennart Poettering proposed a new extension to systemd, systemd-homed.service. A video of his session can be downloaded from media.ccc.de with accompanying slides [PDF].
In his presentation, Poettering outlines a number of problems he sees with the current system, like /etc needs to be writeable, UIDs need to be consistent across systems, and lack of encryption and resource management.
His goals with the proposed solution are migrateable and self-contained, UID-independent home directories with extensible user records that unify the user's password and encryption key; LUKS locking on system suspend; and Yubikey support.
He identifies a number of problems this new idea could cause with SSH logins, disk space assignments, UID assignments, and LUKS locking.
He plans to introduce JSON user records that can be queried via a Varlink interface and to a certain extent are convertible to and from existing formats. The home directories will be stored as LUKS-encrypted files that will be managed by the proposed new service, systemd-homed.service. The system integration will be supported by pam_systemd and systemd-logind.service.
It will be interesting to see how the world responds to this new take on systemd's ever-increasing encroachment of Linux.
... and lastly, this story is brought to you from a systemd-free laptop.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @01:43PM (30 children)
No, you don't. If you want to write something, use /var. /etc only should be written to if you want to change some configuration, system-wide.
That would be nice... if your in an enterprise environment... there are solutions for that.
Again, only useful for enterprise environments, where solutions already exist. In all other cases it is overhead.
No shit Einstein... you're not solving problems... you're creating them... stop doing that!
Ugh... keep reinventing the wheel... who pays this guy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @02:17PM (2 children)
[quote]Ugh... keep reinventing the wheel... who pays this guy?[/quote]
Clearly either Microsoft or one of those companies that provides paid support for Linux.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @04:43PM
I thought he was paid by SCO?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @10:55PM
It's RedHat. The largest Linux paid support company on the planet.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @02:23PM (9 children)
Well, /etc contains files that are not strictly configuration (e.g. /etc/mtab) and files that are technically configuration but may need to be changed dynamically (e.g. /etc/resolv.conf), which means that /etc has to be on a writeable filesystem — unless, of course, these files are placed somewhere else (like /var) and replaced with symbolic links in /etc for backward compatibility.
So yes, you are right that it does not have to be writeable, but at the same time, you are wrong stating that it only needs to be written if you want to change some configuration system-wide.
Lennart Poettering's fascination with complexity is well-known and the idea of having everything in a binary format or a not-so-human-friendly-but-still-almost-readable format is a pity. I hanker back to the times where I could easily search for a configuration setup with find/grep/awk/... instead of having to rely on soul-searching Google endeavours to discover the right service setup or systemctl option.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 22 2019, @02:58PM (6 children)
Gentoo. Nuff said.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday September 22 2019, @04:44PM (1 child)
Who the hell modded you troll for this? +1 coming momentarily. I started my Linux journey on Gentoo more than 15 years ago (back when a 1 GHz T-Bird was top of the line...) and credit it with teaching me to look at *why* things work, not just how.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 23 2019, @12:54AM
When you've got Linux users who don't like compiling things, you know you're bigtime.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Troll) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:01PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:36PM (1 child)
It's starting to look like Gentoo is a possible for me: I love Manjaro, but it seems that removing systemd is a pain in the ass there.
I might have to look at dual booting Gentoo and go from there.....Gentoo, it seems, has changed from when i used it, but not a whole hell of a lot.
I wish they'd leave things alone unless it ABSOLUTELY makes it better.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 23 2019, @12:56AM
If you don't want to compile everything there's Calculate Linux [calculate-linux.org]. Basically Gentoo with a BINHOST and a few handy scripts if you're not using it for server farms.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday September 22 2019, @09:09PM
Yep, another systemd-free Gentoo user here.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:41PM
/etc/mtab -> ../proc/self/mounts
If you are writing to /etc on a regular basis, you are doing it wrong.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Sunday September 22 2019, @10:14PM
I don't think mtab is a good example, because it's outdated. I eliminated mtab in Debian around 8 years back now, along with the util-linux maintainer who made it use procfs for everything. resolv.conf is fair enough; though most modern distributions make it a symlink. Overall, the direction has been to remove these special-case writable files from /etc and put them in /var or similar, making it possible to have only readonly state in /etc. However, some software, like CUPS, does like to rewrite its configuration in /etc; IMO these services should be putting that dynamic configuration into /var.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @03:07PM
"who pays this guy?"
RedmondHat.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Sunday September 22 2019, @04:42PM (14 children)
Red Hat. What you keep saying is 'enterprise environments' - which is precisely who Red Hat want to provide systems and support for. systemd isn't a mistake for them - if meets exactly their needs. It might not be what the home user wants, but RH don't care. You cannot be a money stream for them. From their point of view it makes perfect sense - for us, maybe things appear different.
'
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Sunday September 22 2019, @04:55PM (6 children)
Seems like we need a distro that's focused on SOHO systems instead of enterprise computing. Luckily, systemd does seem to be pretty modular, so distros are free to pick and choose which components they want to use. Some parts of it make sense for SOHO computing, other parts (like this) really don't, and a SOHO/single-user focused distro should leave out the components that don't make sense in that context.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday September 22 2019, @05:43PM (2 children)
When debian went systemd, I felt that the fight was over.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by janrinok on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:19PM
It was - you can choose whether to use a systemd distro or not. What is there to argue about?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:53PM
Not so much.
VOID is fighting the good fight. There are only a few guys working on it, but it is amazing how good their stuff is. It's runit based, rolling release, and more stable than Arch. The guys who are behind it wanted all the software of Linux, but more of a BSD package system. So it is Linux for Unix people. And it is EU based, which has some advantages.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:54PM (1 child)
Oh c'mon... Who needs a "distro"? Just write a script to collect all the source files and compile from that. What's this obsession with market share? Everybody wants to make a million bucks off their favorite hobby. Just be satisfied your electronic contraption runs without Microsoft.
But, if you insist, the path of least resistance is Slackware. Full installation takes less than 10 minutes. Just remember "nomodeset" in case your video fucks up
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @11:03PM
You're welcome [linuxfromscratch.org]
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday September 22 2019, @10:58PM
Like Slackware.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:09PM (5 children)
Other linuxes worked just fine without his shit.
Redhat is not Linux, not in implementation, not in the Unix small individual tools that do one thing and do it well.
I'm sure someone can come up with lyrics to The day Linux died, to the tune American Pie.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:17PM (4 children)
RedHat uses systemd. Debian uses systemd. Ubuntu uses systemd. It is not a single distro - it has business benefits for many distros. But you don't have to use it. You probably downloaded it for free, so choose another distro that doesn't use systemd. Your problem has just gone away.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:02PM (1 child)
Yes, what you say is true in principal, but not quite so, in practice.
It makes me really sad that Debian went with systemd, by default (when using a linux kernel). Debian always called itself the, "universal operating system'. In the past, there was more truth to this claim. You used to be able to run the same Debian userspace with a Linux kernel, a FreeBSD kernel, a GNU HURD kernel, and even an OpenSolaris kernel. Now, the Linux version is this weird fucked up thing, so knowledge does not transfer, and the maintainers of the non-Linux ports have to do a lot more work-- since the Linux version has been the defacto upstream to the rest of the ports.
I run systems that are not x86. And while ARM is now supported pretty well by many distros, Debian is the only game in town for more obscure architectures. Debian also has, for years, made cross compiling a simple task, that got even easier with their multi-lib. Just apt-get your toolchain and foreign arch libraries and setup binfmt to automatically run arch-x binaries via qemu so cross builds of things using autoconf, with tests that assume it is running native, just work.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:48AM
Maybe true for your principal, but not true in principle. See what I did there? Two different words, with two different spellings. Now, I suppose, you will accuse me of being a pendant.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @10:59PM
Devuan and Artix do not use systemd.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday September 23 2019, @07:34PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:29PM
Actually, since Red Hat was bought by IBM [redhat.com], IBM pays him. Apart from that, what you say makes sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:38PM
who pays this guy?
It is obviously the work of Il Diablo.