Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

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 #1Original Submission #2

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Eunuchswear on Saturday October 17 2015, @11:07AM

    by Eunuchswear (525) on Saturday October 17 2015, @11:07AM (#251056) Journal

    What's stopping us wrapping up the existing init systems in the same way using the same features.

    Nothing. Do it. Let a million flowers bloom.

    --
    Watch this Heartland Institute video [youtube.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2