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A Technical Critique of Systemd

posted by janrinok on Friday October 16 2015, @08:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the what,-no-apocalypse? dept.

About 6 months ago, there was much discussion here and elsewhere regarding the introduction of systemd in many of the leading linux distros. Some of us chose to move to alternative software, but for many others the change came and went largely unnoticed. Now, an Anonymous Coward writes:

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.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by present_arms on Friday October 16 2015, @04:44PM

    by present_arms (4392) on Friday October 16 2015, @04:44PM (#250640) Homepage Journal

    I remaster PCLinuxOS where systemd isn't touched, we do use parallel booting and have good old fashioned logs :) I have ran systemd distros but they never last long on my boix, one bug or another raises it's head and although I know that no software is bug free, having bugs in init is just stupid. Then when I do look for the problem, I have to boot a dvd and use some crap to look at the logs... read that you can make then human readable again, tried that, most of the logs are missing.. so for now, just like I did with KDE4, Pulse Audio, I'm avoiding anything that's systemd, can't see the point when nothing was wrong in the first place. But that could be just me :)

    Alie

    --
    http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
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  • (Score: 1) by fritsd on Friday October 16 2015, @07:06PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Friday October 16 2015, @07:06PM (#250765) Journal

    It's not just you :-)