My 2 cents on systemd

[Renich]

Hello, Funtoo community,

 

I am a happy desktop and server user of Funtoo. I consider this community as good and awesome as the best FOSS communities out there. I am, of those, who actually have fun using Funtoo.

 

That said, I want to express my honest opinion on our systemd stance.

 

Now, before I start, this is not:

 

* a request

* a claim for support

* a rant

 

This is only my opinion and, since we coexist in a free and friendly community, I think this is the right place to post this.

 

Systemd has been adopted by many of the important GNU & Linux distributions all around. It is the standard in all the new main stream distributions; or, at least, most of them. This is not because they're all blockheads and made the decision to switch just for the sake of fashion. Then again, I have not read the code and am not aware of the specifics.

 

It is used a lot and it will be the industry standard for servers and embedded systems. 

 

We do not use it. We consider it trash. We, also, alienate ourselves from the rest of the industry and become something totally different; which makes it really hard to be considered as a serious alternative OS for the aforementioned. One can, always, implement it as far as one can and use it wherever it is possible. It's, still, hard to convince my manager/client that Funtoo is awesome, though.

 

Systemd is not bad at all. I've used it since I come from Fedora. To me, it is really simple to use, well documented and easy to understand. It manages almost every aspect of the system; and keeps growing since almost every upstream project is using it and contributing to it. It is destined to become better.

 

Meanwhile, we cannot even use it since it is not supported. This choice is not given to us. One has to go against our distro in order to try it out or test it's implementation. The alternative is to switch to Gentoo; but I didn't come to Funtoo to start using Gentoo.

 

Hey, OpenRC is not bad at all. It might lack some functionality or, maybe, it is my ignorance talking. Anyway, it is what we use and what we have. It boots fast and it's able to get the job done and pretty well. It is easy to use and stuff... but I don't see upstream distributions adopting it nor contributing in any way.

 

<Sigh>... I just think we had a choice here... that's all.

[stac80]

I don't see your point about Funtoo choosing to be left out of the systemd club. I can't speak for the Funtoo community at large but I think Funtoo itself is systemd agnostic. Anyone is welcome to run Funtoo with systemd or with Openrc. If upstream packages support systemd then they should also work on Funtoo. Funtoo leaves that choice up to the end user which is, to me, a "pure" linux way of doing things.

 

Every Funtoo installation is like a snowflake; everyone different and unique.

[666threesixes666]

yeah, i dont think you'll see any support on the bug tracker though...  we don't have a huge dev team to address issues of these sorts.  i started contributing systemd documentation before ANYONE was aware of it.  i started the whole 2 year long thread on the subject of boot speed.  people of linbit got me started on systemd, and broke at least 3 of my systems in the process.  i just recently learned how to start deving from local overlay documentation in the funtoo dev guide.  i think the major point is that as default were sticking to our openrc guns which are very straight forward bash scripts.  systemd support within funtoo specific ebuilds is probably problematic.  i think i was running monit as pid 1 for a while.  openrc is getting features of process monitoring and mail notification of failure if it doesn't have it already...  i was using openrc to init zero to xorg as quickly as possible and monit to start up other services on the side and restart if they were crashed.

[Renich]

I don't see your point about Funtoo choosing to be left out of the systemd club. I can't speak for the Funtoo community at large but I think Funtoo itself is systemd agnostic. Anyone is welcome to run Funtoo with systemd or with Openrc. If upstream packages support systemd then they should also work on Funtoo. Funtoo leaves that choice up to the end user which is, to me, a "pure" linux way of doing things.

 

Every Funtoo installation is like a snowflake; everyone different and unique.

 

Yes, well, if you want ot use systemd on Funtoo, you need to deactivate all the anti-systemd settings, masks and work done in order to avoid it. I mean, in the end, I could start using BSDs kernel and some obscure filesystem for what I can tell. The thing is there is no easy way of doing it that I know off.

[aryvandaar]

From experience using Systemd distros it's like Windows, sometimes it breaks on its own. There have been several time when my system couldn't boot cause Systemd messed up the booting. 

 

I've used OpenRC less than Systemd, but OpenRC has never been unstable for me.

 

This is why I think that Systemd is bad, but the main reason is that Systemd tries to do too much. I  don't want an init system with a million functions. I want an init system that is just an init system. 

 

Init systems shouldn't be complicated, that's when errors start happening. Understanding systemd is like understanding law. 

[funfool]

I never have tried systemd. The problem with systemd is it tries to be to big and do to much all at once.

I was totally perplexed as the distros started jumping on board with this.

It is another of Lennart Poterings pet projects, he has started several and somehow he seems to lose interest and never completes his work.

Pulseaudio is one of these projects and has open bugs for a very long time, I wonder if he is even still involved with it?

Dont get me wrong, I think pulseaudio is a very complicated wrapper for alsa, and it serves a area that alsa just cant do by itself.

There are music lovers everywhere that worship pulseaudio.

But why did all the distros jump on board, and start adding pulsaudio like it was the next greatest invention since sliced bread.

I have had my own frustrating experiences with pa, spent hours trying to solve them, with help from friends on irc. Never could solve the annoying issue.

And I never needed pa, simple alsa sounded just as good and did everything I needed. How many hours I wasted over the years helping some collage student on irc try to fix pa issues, when all they need is alsa for their school laptop.

But all the distros like to advertise the latest greatest and force  a huge complex audio system on you, when maybe only 15% of users actually need the features pa offers.

 

Same thing happened with systemd, Pottering works for redhat, so they said they would adopt it in x amount years, and of course fedora where is being tested.

Sabayon who wants to claim to be bleeding edge could not wait to use it as a advertising tool, so did arch .... but wait guys! this is barely from alpha to beta, and they all start jumping on it.

Arch lost a lot of users over it, was a sad day when debian said it would use it, They lost a lot of their main devs over it. Look at the devuan project, they forked debian and stayed systemd free.

All of this excitement happened in such a short time, with a project that has not been tested. It continues to try and grow larger and more complex, it wants to take over your whole system including the kernel. It is not the linux way.

The dev are so arrogant, they claimed it was a kernel bug, when their code in userspace did not work, and it had no business being there in the first place.  Those were some fun mails to read :)

I do not think it is settled yet, as people learn what they jumped into, and will be searching for another way out.

 

I do not think openrc will ever be truly accepted by the masses, it is uniquely gentoo. It is the tool that allows users to easily open the hood on the race car and tune things up.

imho, people like debian or redhat, really do not want their users under the hood mucking things up, making things unstable.

And it is one of the biggest features of *ntoo systems to me. If I did not have openrc, I may as well just install ubuntu.

[Oleg Vinichenko]

with all respect to participants, i did not read all thread, sorry.

just a random find:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437#issue-92222422

Nice, eh?

[j-g-]

Yes, well, if you want ot use systemd on Funtoo, you need to deactivate all the anti-systemd settings, masks and work done in order to avoid it. I mean, in the end, I could start using BSDs kernel and some obscure filesystem for what I can tell. The thing is there is no easy way of doing it that I know off.

Last time I tried I had to use my own overlay to get some of the packages from the gentoo tree, and  some unmasking as you said, It can be done is not that complicated, but definitely requieres you to be familiar with portage before being able to do it.

[nrc]

This is only my opinion and, since we coexist in a free and friendly community, I think this is the right place to post this.

 Ditto.

 

Systemd has been adopted by many of the important GNU & Linux distributions all around. It is the standard in all the new main stream distributions; or, at least, most of them. This is not because they're all blockheads and made the decision to switch just for the sake of fashion. Then again, I have not read the code and am not aware of the specifics.

 

It is used a lot and it will be the industry standard for servers and embedded systems.

No, they are not all blockheads. That doesn't mean that they're making the right choice.  Redhat is happy to have their employees setting the Linux ecosystem on a path which they dictate because they can fund the resources to make it happen.  So they have people in all the major projects creating interdependencies which Poettering has boasted will make it impractical for distros to use anything but systemd.

 

Many distributions have gone along simply because they don't have the resources to fix everything that Poettering has broken and will continue to break as he slowly consumes the entire system and user space.  Others actually are blockheads and simply don't understand that what they're doing is ultimately bad for Linux and the open source world.

 

We do not use it. We consider it trash. We, also, alienate ourselves from the rest of the industry and become something totally different; which makes it really hard to be considered as a serious alternative OS for the aforementioned. One can, always, implement it as far as one can and use it wherever it is possible. It's, still, hard to convince my manager/client that Funtoo is awesome, though.

 

If Linus hadn't alienated himself from the rest of the industry back when he decided to do his own kernel we wouldn't have Linux today.  This is how open source becomes stronger.  People with ideas are free to find better ways to do things.  systemd cuts a growing swath through the Linux ecosystem where nobody else is allowed to have a better idea because they're tightly coupling all the pieces they control together and they won't play nice with anyone.

 

Most of the world doesn't use rolling release source distributions either.  You're saying you can convince your manager/client that's the right choice but choosing openrc over systemd is a problem?

 

Systemd is not bad at all. I've used it since I come from Fedora. To me, it is really simple to use, well documented and easy to understand. It manages almost every aspect of the system; and keeps growing since almost every upstream project is using it and contributing to it. It is destined to become better.

I used it before I switched from Fedora also.  We have a fundamental difference of opinion because the things you seem to think are good are actually very bad in my view.   It continues growing, I'll give you that.  But not in a good way.

 

Meanwhile, we cannot even use it since it is not supported. This choice is not given to us. One has to go against our distro in order to try it out or test it's implementation. The alternative is to switch to Gentoo; but I didn't come to Funtoo to start using Gentoo.

You already noted that most distributions are using systemd.  Those systems by in large don't give the choice of replacing systemd with openrc.   Fedora had a choice and they made it.  Funtoo had a choice and they made it.  Each distro is directing effort where they feel that it will most benefit their goals.

 

I believe strongly that Linux should not become a homogeneous ecosystem where everyone is forced into a single choice dictated by the strongest  players.  I appreciate the fact that Funtoo has decided not to go along with those who think that's the right direction for Linux.  

 

I'm happy that Funtoo has chosen to focus on making things work without systemd and I hope that they'll continue that focus.

[Renich]

Guys, thanks a lot for your opinions on my own. It's been a fun read and; like everything in the real world, I agree with some, disagree with some and learned a few things in the way.

 

I don't want to come out as a Fedora/systemd chauvinist. I will, also, reserve my opinion on your opinions. This is a private talk we can have, on 1-on-1 basis. Feel free to write to renich a7 woralelandia 6?7 com and we can further on the discussion. If you want to have it online; here; at the forum, let me know. I just want to avoid flames at all cost; that's why I am trying to be cautious.

 

Again, thank you for the awesome feedback.

[gb00s]

Systemd = Black Swan on the horizont

[uudruid74]

My opinion on systemd:  systemd is horrible.  Binary logs is a horrible idea.  Restarting services is bad (if I want that, I'll use Nagios and have it actually monitored and get proper notifications and prevention of thrashing if the service can't be started).  Putting everything into pid1 is bad - the main difference between pid 1 and all others is that if pid 1 dies, so does your server.  As long as its external to pid 1, it can be rescued.  If someone wants systemd, there are other distros (gentoo, etc).

 

Pulseaudio ... a horrible waste of effort that should have been spent on jack.  The capabilities added should have been added to jack instead.  It would still be possible to merge pulseaudio and jackd, and I think Linux needs this.  Having to switch between "pro" audio and a minimal "please switch the audio to another device" capability really bites.  I use a laptop and for movies, I want the video player's audio going out the HDMI to the monitor and surround system, but I don't play music in surround (evil) nor do I want my mp3/flac audio to stop when the screen is shut down (lock screen powers off the screens and HDMI port), and I NEED my guitar to go through jack for the effects (USB audio device).  So, each app needs to route different places.  A merger of PA's API into Jackd so everything could run via jackd would be awesome.

 

Boot speed:  Actually most ebuild scripts don't require bash, just sh.  Its possible to use a smaller minimal sh to boot your system, but quite a few projects assume that /bin/sh is bash, or autodetect if /bin/sh is bash on install (you'll need to re-emerge these if you switch).  Considering how many bash scripts are invoked, switching the boot process to use a minimal sh instead of bloated old bash can shave quite a bit of time off your boot.  Combine w/parallel start-up and you'll get most of the speed of systemd, but better reliability.

[j-g-]

Guys, thanks a lot for your opinions on my own. It's been a fun read and; like everything in the real world, I agree with some, disagree with some and learned a few things in the way.

Feel free to write to renich a7 woralelandia 6?7 com and we can further on the discussion. If you want to have it online; here; at the forum, let me know. I just want to avoid flames at all cost; that's why I am trying to be cautious.

 

Again, thank you for the awesome feedback.

For the ones interested in running systemd on Funtoo, I had a working configuration with systemd and was in the process of creating profile stuff for it, but the maintaince burden would take too much time I don't have, but I might try again when I have more time, or if there's more people that want to run systemd on top of what funtoo provides and are willing to contribute fixing stuff we could put something together and use github or gitlab as a meeting point for discussion.  I wouldn't try to make it official, neither discuss development or fixes in any funtoo channel, just a overlay that makes easy to install and provides profiles for systemd in the funtoo style, that way unnecessary flames are avoided.

[Renich]

For the ones interested in running systemd on Funtoo, I had a working configuration with systemd and was in the process of creating profile stuff for it, but the maintaince burden would take too much time I don't have, but I might try again when I have more time, or if there's more people that want to run systemd on top of what funtoo provides and are willing to contribute fixing stuff we could put something together and use github or gitlab as a meeting point for discussion.  I wouldn't try to make it official, neither discuss development or fixes in any funtoo channel, just a overlay that makes easy to install and provides profiles for systemd in the funtoo style, that way unnecessary flames are avoided.

 

Well, I'd like to contribute. Same state here. Not much time available, but would love to help.

[j-g-]

Well, I'd like to contribute. Same state here. Not much time available, but would love to help.

I'm glad to read that, with few hours of sleep I was able to put this together, and it seems to work:

https://github.com/j-g-/funtoo-systemd.git

 

Test was

 

 -> unpack funtoo's stage3
# cd ${FUNTOO_CONTAINER_DIR} && systemd-nspawn

 -> add overlay according to instructions on github
 -> sync main tree and overlay

# eselect profile set-flavor <a systemd flavor>
# emerge -avuDN @world
# ^D (logout)
# systemd-nspwan -b 
 -> Systemd  Funtoo Container Working!

Here's a paste of the outuput of the container

 

 

# Running the container (this my prompt)
??| D: /media/devel/containers/funtoo  |  #11 j:0 r:130  |  dev:7  |-
??> 10:30 root@jdesk # systemd-nspawn  -b 
Spawning container funtoo on /media/devel/containers/funtoo.
Press ^] three times within 1s to kill container.
systemd 220 running in system mode. (+PAM -AUDIT -SELINUX +IMA -APPARMOR +SMACK -SYSVINIT +UTMP -LIBCRYPTSETUP -GCRYPT -GNUTLS +ACL -XZ +LZ4 +SECCOMP +BLKID -ELFUTILS +KMOD -IDN)
Detected virtualization systemd-nspawn.
Detected architecture x86-64.

Welcome to Linux!
...
display-manager.service: Cannot add dependency job, ignoring: Unit display-manager.service failed to load: No such file or directory.
[  OK  ] Created slice Root Slice.
[  OK  ] Listening on Journal Socket.
[  OK  ] Listening on Journal Socket (/dev/log).
[  OK  ] Created slice User and Session Slice.
[  OK  ] Reached target Remote File Systems.
[  OK  ] Created slice System Slice.
         Mounting POSIX Message Queue File System...
         Mounting Huge Pages File System...
         Starting Journal Service...
[  OK  ] Created slice system-getty.slice.
[  OK  ] Reached target Swap.
         Starting Remount Root and Kernel File Systems...
[  OK  ] Reached target Slices.
[  OK  ] Reached target Paths.
[  OK  ] Listening on /dev/initctl Compatibility Named Pipe.
[  OK  ] Mounted POSIX Message Queue File System.
[  OK  ] Mounted Huge Pages File System.
[  OK  ] Started Remount Root and Kernel File Systems.
         Starting Load/Save Random Seed...
         Starting Rebuild Dynamic Linker Cache...
         Starting Rebuild Hardware Database...
         Starting Create System Users...
[  OK  ] Started Rebuild Dynamic Linker Cache.
[  OK  ] Started Load/Save Random Seed.
[  OK  ] Started Create System Users.
[  OK  ] Reached target Local File Systems (Pre).
var-lock.mount: Directory /var/lock to mount over is not empty, mounting anyway.
         Mounting Lock Directory...
[  OK  ] Started Journal Service.
         Starting Flush Journal to Persistent Storage...
[  OK  ] Mounted Lock Directory.
[  OK  ] Reached target Local File Systems.
         Starting Rebuild Journal Catalog...
[  OK  ] Started Rebuild Hardware Database.
[  OK  ] Started Rebuild Journal Catalog.
         Starting Update is Completed...
[  OK  ] Started Update is Completed.
[  OK  ] Started Flush Journal to Persistent Storage.
         Starting Create Volatile Files and Directories...
[  OK  ] Started Create Volatile Files and Directories.
         Starting Update UTMP about System Boot/Shutdown...
[  OK  ] Started Update UTMP about System Boot/Shutdown.
[  OK  ] Reached target System Initialization.
[  OK  ] Listening on D-Bus System Message Bus Socket.
[  OK  ] Reached target Sockets.
[  OK  ] Reached target Basic System.
         Starting Permit User Sessions...
         Starting Login Service...
[  OK  ] Started D-Bus System Message Bus.
         Starting D-Bus System Message Bus...
[  OK  ] Reached target Timers.
         Starting Cleanup of Temporary Directories...
[  OK  ] Started Permit User Sessions.
[  OK  ] Started Console Getty.
         Starting Console Getty...
[  OK  ] Reached target Login Prompts.
[  OK  ] Started Login Service.
[  OK  ] Reached target Multi-User System.
[  OK  ] Reached target Graphical Interface.
[  OK  ] Started Cleanup of Temporary Directories.

funtoo login: jc
Password: 

 >>> Release:                       stage3-generic_64-funtoo-current-2015-07-02
 >>> Version:                       2015-07-02
 >>> Created by:                    Daniel Robbins <drobbins@funtoo.org>

 >>> Send suggestions, improvements, bug reports relating to...

 >>> This release:                  Daniel Robbins <drobbins@funtoo.org>
 >>> Funtoo Linux (general):        Funtoo Linux (http://www.funtoo.org)
 >>> Gentoo Linux (general):        Gentoo Linux (http://www.gentoo.org)

 NOTE: This message can be removed by deleting /etc/motd.

??| D: ~  |  #1 j:0 r:0  |  dev:console  |-
??> 10:31 jc@funtoo $ 

 

If time and laziness don't get me tonight, I might look into modifying ego to read overlay profiles not just the ones from the main tree.

 

Feedback is appreciated!

BTW, I have included my ebuild of cockpit[1] in the systemd-server flavor, inspired by Fedora Server.

 

What do you think about creating a google group "Systemd Funtooers" or something like that and continue the dicussion there?

 

[1] http://cockpit-project.org/

[pr1vacy]

Well the systemd guys are making progress I guess.

 

They've sped up the boot time to make all the reboots you'll be doing faster! Sweet!

 

I was on Debian Testing for years.

 

My Debian Testing machine was super stable. In comes systemd and now Debian's testing branch is more like unstable branch because it's very unstable.

 

I switched to the Devuan and Angband.pl repositories and gutted systemd out of my machine and stability returned.

 

Even with apt-pinning,  systemd and it's dependencies are getting called in everywhere in the repositories and for things that don't need them(wine comes to mind)

 

It became a nightmare to keep it out so I decided to find an OS that was anti-systemd or at least didn't require it during install.

 

Found funtoo and it's been great. I've had one hurdle and I posted a message in the forum and got a reply quickly.

 

Problem solved.

 

Systemd has tentacles moving in every direction in Linux. At this rapid rate of growth and the attitude of Poettering and friends it seems obvious to me that they are attempting a coup d'?tat starting with change requests to the kernel.

 

This is madness. Systemd needs to be stopped or Linux will have the reputation of Windows ME.

 

PS...Pulseaudio??!! To date the default Alsa config works perfectly with my laptops subwoofer. If I install Pulse everything is mapped wrong and audio sliders are combined, etc. Why can pulseaudio not configure my sound properly when Alsa has done it for 5 years? Do we really want the SAME group of people tinkering with the heart of our systems?

 

I don't believe the propaganda supporting systemd either. I think a lot of the search results are tainted in favor of systemd when using the big search engines. There is an agenda for sure and it's being backed by very large corporations.

[uudruid74]

 

 

.

They've sped up the boot time to make all the reboots you'll be doing faster! Sweet!

 

I've noticed that systemd is very bad about not being able to restart a service on my Sabayon laptop. It will say its stopped when its not, or will say its already starting when I say to start it, if X fails cause I attempt to try binary AMD drivers, it restarts GDM over and over so I can't log in to fix it, it seems impossible to get it to single user mode to fsck root. And it gets odd problems that I can never seem to resolve except with a reboot. The logs are always locked into a binary journal ....

 

Someone turned my Linux box into Windows! The people that like Systemd grew up on Windows and think rebooting the machine is acceptable. Rebooting doesn't fix problems, it hides them. You only reboot to replace the kernel and that's seldom necessary

 

Sent from my A0001 using Tapatalk

[uudruid74]

Oh yeah, systemd is literally everywhere. I installed a bare minimal Debian image on my BeagleBone and it has systemd! I need 'ifconfig eth0 192.168.12.200' in a script, not systemd. They said that systemd was more efficient!

 

Systemd now has systemd-boot and replaces grub, too! Its like the 'Nothing' from NeverEnding story, consuming everything

 

Sent from my A0001 using Tapatalk

[nrc]

Systemd has tentacles moving in every direction in Linux. At this rapid rate of growth and the attitude of Poettering and friends it seems obvious to me that they are attempting a coup d'?tat starting with change requests to the kernel.

 

I think Poettering already put his toe in the water on this last year with his rant about how mean the Linux Kernel maintainer's list is.  Either he didn't get a sympathetic enough response or he's waiting because he's already got enough on his plate.

 

I have to say that I'm pleased with the way the contra-systemd Linux world has developed in the past year.  A year ago Poettering seemed quiet confident that he had built a dependency trap that would make distributions without systemd undesirable if not completely impractical.  For a while it seemed questionable whether the contra-systemd community would have enough critical mass to tackle some of the more sticky problems that he was creating.

 

Fortunately the developer community has already come through and solved many of those problems and a sustainable ecosystem of alternative solutions appears to have developed.  Ultimately I think this is a good thing. Even as a long time Redhat user it's clear to me that the commercial distros have gained too much weight in pushing the development of Linux to suit their agenda.  It was time to take Linux back from them and it feels like we have the beginnings of that.

[j-g-]

Oh yeah, systemd is literally everywhere. I installed a bare minimal Debian image on my BeagleBone and it has systemd! I need 'ifconfig eth0 192.168.12.200' in a script, not systemd. They said that systemd was more efficient!

 

Systemd now has systemd-boot and replaces grub, too! Its like the 'Nothing' from NeverEnding story, consuming everything

 

Sent from my A0001 using Tapatalk

 

It would be kind of stupid to use ifconfig and a script considering there's systemd-networkd(and ifconfig is unmaintained, I prefer iproute2) , and you could set up a proper unit for static networking, using something simple like this:

/etc/systemd/newtork/50-static-eth0.network

[Match]
Name=eth0

[Network]
Address=192.168.12.200/24
Gateway=192.168.12.1

 

 

 

But I don't know of anything that would prevent something like this from working:

[Unit]
Description=Lazy net config

[Service]
Type=oneshot

ExecStart=/sbin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.12.200

[Install]
WantedBy=network.target

 

Don't like that and would prefer emulating  something like rc.local :

 

[Unit]
Description=Local Service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/sh /etc/rc.local

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

It's going against the point of having unit files,  but it can work.

 

Also bootctl is more like a modern lilo for EFI, that a grub replacement and the configuration is quite simpler than grub.

 

 

BTW: I see you as kind of a unix purits, so here's a video from one of the men who was there when unix was born(Prof. Kernighan),  about pipes and some programming stuff. When unix started, It was not so much about 'one program, one thing', as the design goal, but more about memory constrains.

 

 

Another lie is saying you have to reboot for everything like in windows, apart from being a cheap argument because, the reason is mostly about kernel drivers, wich has nothing to do with systemd., I only reboot when I install a new kernel, if I get updates from systemd, for most stuff systemctl daemon-reload works well if even needed. I get uptimes of ~2-3 weeks regularly if I don't have power outages.

 

PD: The binary logs argument against systemd isn't valid anymore, most livecds and distros have journalctl, and most distros put it in the initramfs also, you yourself said it(systemd is everywhere, isn't it?), and I don't know you but I still can't read and decode bits from the inside of the plate of my hard drive into UTF-8 characters telepathically and have a mental grep to search trough it, You need something that decodes your logs from the BINARY that's on your hard drive anyway, you  need a program to read logs, that's my point, so you CAN read your logs, In fact you can read much more information about failures, and filter it more quickly to get the lines you care about, than what you had by simple text  files in /var/log/, If YOU can't do it only shows you can't or don't want to read manuals nor search the web.

Can you get logs of early boot as this using a traditional grub+sysvinit boot?

 

oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: Initializing cgroup subsys cpuacct
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: Linux version 4.2.3-gentoo-gentoo-kdbus (root@jdesk) (gcc version 4.9.3 (Gentoo 4.9.3 p1.2, pie-0.6.3) ) #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Oct 18 03:14:18 CST 2015
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: Command line: initrd=\initramfs-4.2.3-gentoo-gentoo-kdbus.img root=LABEL=gentoo rootflags=subvol=gentoo-root ro
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: x86/fpu: xstate_offset[2]: 0240, xstate_sizes[2]: 0100
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x01: 'x87 floating point registers'
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x02: 'SSE registers'
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: x86/fpu: Supporting XSAVE feature 0x04: 'AVX registers'
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: x86/fpu: Enabled xstate features 0x7, context size is 0x340 bytes, using 'standard' format.
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: x86/fpu: Using 'eager' FPU context switches.
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: e820: BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
oct 18 10:42:03 localhost kernel: BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000000000000000-0x000000000009efff] usable

[uudruid74]

You have totally missed my point. I need to assign an IP address on an embedded system (yes, memory constrained like original Unix). I don't want systemd-networkd to be available. Telling me that its more efficient for systemd-networkd to parse its configs than it is for my shell to do it is nonsense. And why would I bother to learn this? It brings zero value other than I can't use the same syntax and command lines that have worked for 40 years.

 

And the binary logs get corrupt and they just ignore it. There is a 'wont fix' bug report on it. Blatantly ignoring data corruption! I run systemd on my laptop and I know what crap it causes. When I have time, Funtoo will go back on the system and I can tell you from direct comparison that Funtoo ran just as fast, and had fewer problems.

 

And you think uptimes of 2-3 weeks is good? I'd fire you. Before systemd uptimes were in years and then we asked what hardware component died.

 

I think a lot of people have come to funtoo to get away from systemd. You won't find much love for that cancer here. Linux had become sad ... systemd, advertising, Ubuntu forcing you to use a search and then sharing the search with Amazon ... and in general really poor code stability from bloated software.

 

More about me at https://eddon.systems

[pr1vacy]

My experience with systemd is that when it decided to take a dump and crash there would be nothing in the log or a corrupt log which required a deletion and reboot.

 

What good is the log at this point? Rinse, repeat, CRASH!! over and over.

 

And not only that I would see errors generated that pointed away from systemd...in the wrong direction....but the problem would be something in systemd.

 

Removing it and the other rubbish...ie..libsystemd...and my Debian system was stable.

 

My definition of stable is no crashes or reboots for months. Only when I did a dist-upgrade did I need to reboot.

 

Lets assume it's a problem with the people managing Debians packages. Systemd is perfekt-o-mundo.

 

Is one not the least bit concerned with the way it is rapidly growing into this giant snowball that is trying to become as mandatory as the kernel for linux users?

 

When systemd started it was supposed to be an init system that added modern features and would be quick, reliable, compact...etc....

 

It's an obvious lie. So why would anyone want to defend systemd when they are continously flip flopping and doing things they said they wouldn't do?

 

I seriously question the rationale of the supporters. One must be very naive, very lazy or are a puppet for RH or the EN ESS AY.

[Renich]

Please, respect each other's opinions. We can discuss SystemD and leave out personal attacks. Let's not turn this into a flame war.

 

That said, awesome examples j-g-. Those are some of the reasons why I love SystemD. 

 

Those who have bad experience using SystemD is because of the poorly hacked/configured environment in where they tried it. I recommend checking out Fedora. It works flawlessly and bugs get attended, as the rest of them. I could say the same thing about Pulseaudio.

 

Also, I didn't come to Funtoo because of it's anti-SystemD attitude. I came here bacause:

 

• it's a rolling release distro
• It's taylor made; you can totally customize it (except for SystemD, that is "forbidden")
• The build manager is based on Git.
• It has awesome documentation
• Daniel Robbins maintains it; with the help of a few chosen ones ;)

This is why it surprised me so much when I learned that SystemD would not be supported, ever. 

[pr1vacy]

Personally I think a new trend is moving upward away from systemd.

 

I've witnessed several colleagues ditching OS's that they had used for a decade because they were being forced into systemd.

 

I believe a fork of Linux may be on the horizon since some of the larger distros have removed the support and option for other init systems.

 

Funtoo is at the forefront of this movement. HIP HIP HOORAY for FUNTOO! x3

 

Thanks DR and company.

 

My only regret is it took systemd for me to serioulsy look at Funtoo. It's great! Super lean and super fast. Best OS in the land!

[Renich]

Personally I think a new trend is moving upward away from systemd.

I agree to that.