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: 2) by RamiK on Saturday October 17 2015, @05:08PM
Someone hosting on plan9\werc should know better by now. But, if good and correct system design was a selling point, we wouldn't be debating *nix vs. NT in 2015. We would be debating Plan 9 vs. QNX.
Systemd has just enough planned obsoleteness in it's inherently flawed abstractions to keep system distributors in business for years to come. Seeing how that's, in effect, is the Linux development model, I wouldn't use that particular point against it's Linux adoption. And to be fair to Linux, the alternative isn't a Plan 9 or even a BSD utopia. Rather, it's a closed-source Microsoft \ Apple store.
For BSD, however, the essay raises many valid points. Keep that systemd mess away from other unices if at all feasible. It has no technical or practical benefits for non-Linux.
Here's hoping some saintly figure will write a modern browser for Plan 9 and port the OS to ARM64 when the time comes. Until that temperature drop in Lucy's house, may GNU\linux\systemd\firefox stay open and free as possible.
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