Structural and semantic deficiencies in the systemd architecture for real-world service management
This is a in-depth architectural critique of systemd. It claims to be the first purely technical review of systemd internals, and provides a detailed analysis of several components. It criticizes on the basis of ordering related failures, a difficult to predict execution model, non-determinism in boot-order, as well as several other points.
Though many users would perceive the long processing pipeline to increase reliability and be more "correct" than the simpler case, there is little to acknowledge this. For one thing, none of jobs, transactions, unit semantics or systemd-style dependencies map to the Unix process model, but rather are necessary complications to address issues in systemd being structured as an encapsulating object system for resources and processes (as opposed to a more well-defined process supervisor) and one accommodating for massive parallelism. Reliability gains would be difficult to measure, and that more primal toolkits like those of the daemontools family have been used in large-scale deployments for years would serve as a counterexample needing overview.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @11:11AM
An (overly?) simple analogy would be manual car windows vs. powered windows operated by the car's buggy entertainment system thru the big fat finicky center panel touch console. :) Now imagine your ignition, door locks, fuel door, trunk lid, and power steering is routed through the same system.
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Friday October 16 2015, @02:15PM
Excellent example. Have you read Normal Accidents or watched the movie Brazil?
Mas cerveza por favor.