Scheduled Maintenance: We are aware of an issue with Google, AOL, and Yahoo services as email providers which are blocking new registrations. We are trying to fix the issue and we have several internal and external support tickets in process to resolve the issue. Please see: viewtopic.php?t=158230

 

 

 

systemd is destructive

Here you can discuss every aspect of Debian. Note: not for support requests!
Message
Author
arochester
Emeritus
Emeritus
Posts: 2435
Joined: 2010-12-07 19:55
Has thanked: 14 times
Been thanked: 54 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#151 Post by arochester »

I ?wrongly? though that Debian was about stability. The slowly moving distro built with proven concept and tech.
Systemd was an important change that, I believe, should have been pondered, postponed.
Ahhem! systemd was introduced into the Repository in April 2012. What would be a reasonable period to "ponder, postpone"?
The statement mentions that systemd is “hasty”. It is forgetting that several major releases of several distributions have already happened using systemd as default. It is no longer an experimental technology at all. Compatibility at upgrade time should not be a concern either, since the real outside interfaces (D-Bus, unit files, Debian configuration files) have always been stable (forward compatible) and will remain so.
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/systemd
Overall, many of the arguments of those who don’t want to migrate away from sysvinit (with or without OpenRC) boil down to rumors or irrelevant political stances, while the decision to choose a default init system should be based on technical facts and the shape of the community.
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/systemd

User avatar
debiman
Posts: 3063
Joined: 2013-03-12 07:18

Re: systemd is destructive

#152 Post by debiman »

once again, i'm not trying to give an opinion, but some facts.
fact: systemd has been around (on github) since 2003. i didn't know it was so long.

(actually i might have posted in the wrong thread)

pendrachken
Posts: 1394
Joined: 2007-03-04 21:10
Location: U.S.A. - WI.

Re: systemd is destructive

#153 Post by pendrachken »

acewiza wrote: You seem pretty smart, but I suspect somewhat clouded by your irrational fear of systemd. Were that not the case, you would realize there are perfectly legitimate counterpoints to every item listed above making them positives in favor of systemd. I'm not going to argue them with you because it's already been done ad nausem. Maybe you missed it. But they almost all to a "t" come in the theme of better, more reliable performance, the logging in particular, being a perfect example. Maybe you've never administered a system that logs enough to choke the fastest I/O available, dunno. :?
I don't give a crap about performance. No, really, I don't. I care more about availability: The last administration job I did I was in charge of backups and a build farm. I can't recall a time in the last 25 years where I actually needed to squeak out every last cycle on a machine rather than either add or design in buffer hardware in case of growth. In other words design to be scalable from the get go.

Why I care about availability:
1: I need systems I designed to be available. Period. This includes services both on my main machines and on my failovers. If a service dies on a single machine I want it to STAY DEAD until my monitors can either switch to a failover machine or or take that machine out of the failover pool. SystemD will just keep restarting the service ( by default anyways ). I see this as bad design either way you look at it.
1a: that means that a service could actually be down in a state of being restarted on a failover machine if data is then sent to it. Better to have the service stay dead so I can figure out WHY it fell on its face and correct the issue. Even if it is a semi random occurrence.
2: I can always throw more hardware at a problem if there is a desperate need for more performance. I will say I have never had issues come up where I had to run around with my hair on fire trying to get more hardware in an emergency. I planned ahead and made sure I had enough spare capacity to be a buffer in case of SHTF scenarios. It was kind of my job, and why after the first time I left I was offered almost triple my original pay to come back and clean up after the guy who replaced me decided my "oldschool ways of setting everything up" cost the company millions in a few days of backups that didn't actually backup to anywhere in his "new ideas to make everything easier".
3: for every argument that someone says is solved because systemD "has more performance" I can point out at least one area where it comes up worse compared to sysV / the UNIX philosophy ( which I might add has withstood the test of time... ~47 years so far). I also covered why, at least in the case of services that is always trotted out, the "reliability" argument is actually an argument to avoid using that system.


As an aside, if you are saturating IO with logs you are either doing something VERY wrong like logging an entire cluster to a single non raid arrayed disk, or you have some really serious problems like an array dropping a ton of disks and trying to rebuild itself from spares on the fly while still logging and being used. That or truly poor designs that didn't scale with your growth. At all.


All that being said, I am not afraid of systemD. I don't like it, for many reason including the feature creep and bloat, but I still use it on some of my machines. It works, mostly. Sometimes it needs a little tuneup with a large hammer ( more often than SysV ever did for me anyways ), but it does work. I don't like it, but I don't specifically avoid it. Just like Windows / OS/X / BSD ETC. I don't really like any OS since none of them are perfect, they all have at least a few ugly warts. Well, except for iOS, that's just a toy piece of crap crammed into a phone. I use whatever OS best fits the needs of the job I am doing at the time.
SystemD is OK for Desktops / Laptops, but a pretty poor choice for servers, at least in my grumpy old network designers opinion.
fortune -o
Your love life will be... interesting.
:twisted: How did it know?

The U.S. uses the metric system too, we have tenths, hundredths and thousandths of inches :-P

User avatar
Danielsan
Posts: 659
Joined: 2010-10-10 22:36
Has thanked: 5 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#154 Post by Danielsan »

pendrachken wrote: SystemD is OK for Desktops / Laptops, but a pretty poor choice for servers, at least in my grumpy old network designers opinion.
Don't worry you are not alone, at Google they think the same:

http://marc.merlins.org/linux/talks/Pro ... ProdNG.pdf
"page 16"

SysV vs Debian Insserv vs Upstart vs Systemd: Insserv
  • Debian had an upstart like dependency specified boot, before everyone else with insserv and startpar.
  • Before reboot, insserv will analyze specified dependencies between scripts, and rename initscripts as S10, some as S20, and so forth.
  • Everything under S10 is started at the same time, and things in S20 won't start until all of S10xx has started.
  • It's easy to visualize and review dependencies before reboot.
  • We can freeze them in our image, and deploy everywhere
  • Simple, and everything is the same => winner for us.

User avatar
acewiza
Posts: 357
Joined: 2013-05-28 12:38
Location: Out West

Re: systemd is destructive

#155 Post by acewiza »

pendrachken wrote:SystemD is OK for Desktops / Laptops, but a pretty poor choice for servers, at least in my grumpy old network designers opinion.
Some of the most high-end high-availability mission-critical systems on the planet have been running with systemd for many years. You appear to be one of the old veterans stuck in the past I alluded to earlier. Your opinion is obviously misinformed.
Nobody would ever ask questions If everyone possessed encyclopedic knowledge of the man pages.

User avatar
edbarx
Posts: 5401
Joined: 2007-07-18 06:19
Location: 35° 50 N, 14 º 35 E
Been thanked: 2 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#156 Post by edbarx »

I would NOT say 'systemd is destructive' but systemd can make autonomous decisions in the event of system instability. Unlike sysvinit, systemd is more shifted towards making an OS autonomous. This means the behaviour of an OS with systemd is more difficult to predict in the event of problems. The younger generations demand more system autonomy while the older generations demand to have complete system control.

In my case, when I used systemd I was dissatisfied with its 'stability' which reminded me of the time I used Ubuntu and MS Windows 95/98. If systemd allows me to multiboot several Linux installations on the same machine without meddling them behind my back, that would be good news to me. I also need to install whatever graphical interface I deem fit for my needs. Besides that, I require bigger than normal fonts nicely and smoothly rendered to ease unnecessary stress on my eyes. I also want my system to do updates only when I command it. For me a shutdown is a shutdown, not an update opportunity.
Debian == { > 30, 000 packages }; Debian != systemd
The worst infection of all, is a false sense of security!
It is hard to get away from CLI tools.

pendrachken
Posts: 1394
Joined: 2007-03-04 21:10
Location: U.S.A. - WI.

Re: systemd is destructive

#157 Post by pendrachken »

acewiza wrote:
pendrachken wrote:SystemD is OK for Desktops / Laptops, but a pretty poor choice for servers, at least in my grumpy old network designers opinion.
Some of the most high-end high-availability mission-critical systems on the planet have been running with systemd for many years. You appear to be one of the old veterans stuck in the past I alluded to earlier. Your opinion is obviously misinformed.

Really? systemD runs on *BSD and and the huge amounts of RTOS's ? Last I heard Google, the leader in datacenter usage still wasn't using systemD either.

And as I recall, RedHat subscriptions have been on the decline overall since.... systemD was crammed into RHEL. That should tell you something right there...


You appear to be one of the old veterans stuck in the past I alluded to earlier. Your opinion is obviously misinformed.
Or maybe you just can't read. You most likely never bothered to learn init, scripting to do exactly what your particular systems needs to do at any specific time, and are just enamored by shiny new crap. Probably never worked in networking / admin of even a Fortune500 company either.

But yeah, MY opinion from 20+ years of doing admin work and network / datacenter cluster design, and seeing what works and doesn't in real world conditions makes me misinformed. Right....

There is an old saying for people like you and pottering: " Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it... poorly."
fortune -o
Your love life will be... interesting.
:twisted: How did it know?

The U.S. uses the metric system too, we have tenths, hundredths and thousandths of inches :-P

User avatar
bw123
Posts: 4015
Joined: 2011-05-09 06:02
Has thanked: 1 time
Been thanked: 28 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#158 Post by bw123 »

edbarx wrote: This means the behaviour of an OS with systemd is more difficult to predict in the event of problems
I agree with this, and I think behavior is also more difficult to control, and problems are more difficult to solve with systemd. If I have a networking problem, instead of looking at 'networking' related config files, I have to wade through systemd's mess, and rule that out. The same is true with most other problems, we now have to rule out systemd config errors, in addition to each category like sound, video, network, filesystem, etc.
resigned by AI ChatGPT

User avatar
/tmp
Posts: 426
Joined: 2011-12-31 08:39
Location: GNU Userlands
Has thanked: 1 time
Been thanked: 3 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#159 Post by /tmp »

Does systemd cause issues with sound/audio drivers? I am trying to build a stable multimedia production workstation for producing my radio commercials.
Bookworm | Intel I7-3667U | Apple Macbook Air 5,2 (Mid 2012) (Laptop) | 8 GB RAM | 3rd Gen Intel Core Graphics

User avatar
Danielsan
Posts: 659
Joined: 2010-10-10 22:36
Has thanked: 5 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#160 Post by Danielsan »

/tmp wrote:Does systemd cause issues with sound/audio drivers? I am trying to build a stable multimedia production workstation for producing my radio commercials.
Don't worry about it, systemd's author is the same of pulse-audio, you are in good hands! :wink:

arochester
Emeritus
Emeritus
Posts: 2435
Joined: 2010-12-07 19:55
Has thanked: 14 times
Been thanked: 54 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#161 Post by arochester »

It is about time to close this thread.

There are two entrenched sides. Each seeks to promote their views and oppose the other.

There is no "answer". No solution, no conclusion, no end. People are not being convinced to change their stance.

It seems irrelevant how many people have viewed this thread. I suspect it is one side or the other seeing what the other side has written.

To add more posts to this thread has become fairly pointless. It is just adding petrol to the flames. Otherwise, it should have burnt out some time ago.

We need to agree to disagree.

User avatar
oswaldkelso
df -h | grep > 20TiB
df -h | grep > 20TiB
Posts: 1486
Joined: 2005-07-26 23:20
Location: UK
Has thanked: 1 time
Been thanked: 55 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#162 Post by oswaldkelso »

It is about time to close this thread.
What! Because you don't like the fact your side of the argument is being criticized? I seem to recall you have form on locking threads that oppose your view.
There are two entrenched sides. Each seeks to promote their views and oppose the other.
All the more reason to have the discussion. I've seen no real trolling and apart from the usual one liners, but have seen some fairly balanced questions raised.
There is no "answer". No solution, no conclusion, no end. People are not being convinced to change their stance.

There is no answer yet. Is that why the debate so long as civil, needs to continue.
It seems irrelevant how many people have viewed this thread. I suspect it is one side or the other seeing what the other side has written.
I agree the whole point is to see each others point of view.
To add more posts to this thread has become fairly pointless. It is just adding petrol to the flames. Otherwise, it should have burnt out some time ago.
I take it you've not been reading the Debian bugs lists then. New bugs come in all the time. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgrepo ... t=unstable or heard about the row that kicked off on Debian irc the other month.

We need to agree to disagree.


No. We need to be informed. systemd may suddenly become bug free or have a change of heart as to it's direction and pull back from trying to control more and more packages. Other inits may develops new features that are more acceptable to a wider range of people. We can't make discussions without debate. If your not interested in the debate don't read or at least don't partake in the thread.
Free Software Matters
Ash init durbatulûk, ash init gimbatul,
Ash init thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
My oldest used PC: 1999 imac 333Mhz 256MB PPC abandoned by Debian

User avatar
Danielsan
Posts: 659
Joined: 2010-10-10 22:36
Has thanked: 5 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#163 Post by Danielsan »

@ oswaldkelso

I agree with you, and let me say you where is the paradox, because most of us have been labeled as hater (now it means "I have no arguments to reply against you") without arguments to discuss and from the other side the technical arguments, a part you are an hater, is repeating as a mantra that systemd is "better for design", pretty funny.

However this is even funnier: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo ... =773538#36

:mrgreen:
Last edited by Danielsan on 2017-04-11 14:44, edited 2 times in total.

User avatar
acewiza
Posts: 357
Joined: 2013-05-28 12:38
Location: Out West

Re: systemd is destructive

#164 Post by acewiza »

pendrachken wrote:Really? systemD runs on *BSD and and the huge amounts of RTOS's ? Last I heard Google, the leader in datacenter usage still wasn't using systemD either.
What a pity your lack of awareness has exposed your ignorance so clearly. :roll:

The things you haven't "heard" would fill volumes.
pendrachken wrote:And as I recall, RedHat subscriptions have been on the decline overall since.... systemD was crammed into RHEL. That should tell you something right there...
It would be so amusing to watch you attempt extracting your foot from your mouth If you actually had a clue about some of the places where Redhat is being used these days.
pendrachken wrote:Or maybe you just can't read. You most likely never bothered to learn...
The lame ad-hominem attack does little for your cause. Your "assumptions" at least have good entertainment value, if nothing else.
pendrachken wrote:But yeah, MY opinion from 20+ years of doing admin work and network / datacenter cluster design, and seeing what works and doesn't in real world conditions makes me misinformed.
No, just naive. But don't worry, you'll get over it soon enough if you ever get tired of sitting in the corner of your little fifedom dreaming up reasons why your delusions about it represent the be-all and end-all of 'nix in the realm of 1's and 0's.
Nobody would ever ask questions If everyone possessed encyclopedic knowledge of the man pages.

User avatar
Danielsan
Posts: 659
Joined: 2010-10-10 22:36
Has thanked: 5 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#165 Post by Danielsan »

@ acewiza

I posted on the previous page that Google on its Debian derivated doesn't use systemd but insserv and startpar.

arochester
Emeritus
Emeritus
Posts: 2435
Joined: 2010-12-07 19:55
Has thanked: 14 times
Been thanked: 54 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#166 Post by arochester »

15 Advanced Linux Interview Questions and Answers - http://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/advanc ... s-answers/
9) systemd over init system, What do you think?

Systemd is well designed. It was conceived from the top, not just to fix bugs, but to be a correct implementation of the base system services. A systemd, may refer to all the packages, utilities and libraries around daemon. It was designed to overcome the shortcomings of init. It itself is a background process which is designed to start processes in parallel, thus reducing the boot time and computational overhead. It has a lot other features as compared to init while Sysvinit was never designed to cope with the dynamic/event-based architecture of the current Linux kernel. The only reason why we still use it today is the cost of a migration.

Systemd ships a growing number of useful, unified command-line interfaces for system settings and control (timedatectl, bootctl, hostnamectl, loginctl, machinectl, kernel-install, localectl). In Debian, they use the existing configuration files without breaking compatibility.
Systemd makes the boot process much simpler, entirely removing the need to specify dependencies in many cases thanks to D-Bus activation, socket activation, file/inotify activation and udev integration.
Systemd supports SELinux integration while SysV doesn't
Systemd can handle the boot process from head to toe, without needing to use any of the existing shell scripts. Systemd extends the logging features of the system in many ways with journald, and can remain integrated with the existing rsyslog daemon. Logs are in a structured format, attributed to filename, line of code, PID and service. They include the early boot (starting from initramfs). They can be quickly filtered and programmatically accessed through an efficient interface.
Systemd unit files, unlike SysV scripts, can usually be shipped by upstream, or at least shared with other distributions (already more than 1000 existing unit files in Fedora) without any changes, the Debian specifics being handled by systemd itself.
Systemd is incredibly fast (1 second to boot). It was not designed with speed in mind, but doing things correctly avoids all the delays currently incurred by the boot process.
The transition plan is easy, since existing init scripts are treated as first-class services: scripts can depend (using LSB headers) on units, units can depend on scripts. More than 99% of init scripts can be used without a modification.
It is not just init. It unifies, in fewer lines of code, everything that is related to starting services and managing session groups: user login, cron jobs, network services (inetd), virtual TTY management… Having a single system to handle all of that allows us to remove a lot of cruft, and to use less memory on the system.

User avatar
Danielsan
Posts: 659
Joined: 2010-10-10 22:36
Has thanked: 5 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#167 Post by Danielsan »

Cool, this seems written by Pottering himself... This is the same stuff from a lot of time and I don't want taking out the counter arguments like, for example, the famous PID 1 issue.

But is interesting the reason behind Google choice, it says about systemd:
SysV vs Debian Insserv vs Upstart vs Systemd: Systemd
  • Originally went into Fedora for testing and tuning.
  • Not yet included in server distributions like RHEL.
  • Very disruptive, big redesign of how Linux systems boot. It replaces many core parts of low level Linux.
  • On the plus side, Lennart has done a very good job in explaining the rationale behind the required changes and the gains.
  • Ideal design does not rely on dependencies being specified by the packagers, they are auto computed on demand. Real life is sometimes otherwise though, and requires manual dependencies.
  • Like upstart, given boot order not specified, could trigger race conditions in our scripts or daemons, and only on 1% of our machines.
  • Systemd sounded simple, but the implementation and getting everything right is much more complex than we're comfortable with.
http://marc.merlins.org/linux/talks/ProdNG-LISA/ProdNG.pdf

If we are looking for a better init system against sysv all the alternatives are better, when we confront systemd with the rest of the alternatives those are pretty good as well, the main difference is systemd does more than initializing the system, for many that is a problem for other it is better. There is nothing absolute in systemd if not the fact it was pushed and promoted by Red Hat and all the projects related directly and indirectly with Red Hat decided to strictly integrate it like Gnome3 which relies on systemd.
Last edited by Danielsan on 2017-04-11 15:29, edited 1 time in total.

arochester
Emeritus
Emeritus
Posts: 2435
Joined: 2010-12-07 19:55
Has thanked: 14 times
Been thanked: 54 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#168 Post by arochester »

Date of PDF?
Not yet included in server distributions like RHEL.
systemd in RHEL repository June 2014

User avatar
phenest
Posts: 1702
Joined: 2010-03-09 09:38
Location: The Matrix

Re: systemd is destructive

#169 Post by phenest »

Hands up all those against systemd for whatever reason.

Now put your hand down if you can't provide a link or quote to a source those is neither out of date or speculative/opinionated.

Hmmm. How strange. No one has got their hands up.
ASRock H77 Pro4-M i7 3770K - 32GB RAM - Pioneer BDR-209D

User avatar
oswaldkelso
df -h | grep > 20TiB
df -h | grep > 20TiB
Posts: 1486
Joined: 2005-07-26 23:20
Location: UK
Has thanked: 1 time
Been thanked: 55 times

Re: systemd is destructive

#170 Post by oswaldkelso »

Has silly season started, I thought it was spring.

Hands up all those for systemd for whatever reason.

Now put your hand down if you can't provide a link or quote to a source those is neither out of date or speculative/opinionated.

Hmmm. How strange. No one has got their hands up.


By the way, how does this date thing work with the Unix philosophy.
Free Software Matters
Ash init durbatulûk, ash init gimbatul,
Ash init thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
My oldest used PC: 1999 imac 333Mhz 256MB PPC abandoned by Debian

Locked