The System For Switching To SystemD In OpenSUSE

While Fedora 15 may be the first Linux distribution to deploy the systemd start-up manager en mass, it's not the only distribution that's looking to take advantage of this new FreeDesktop.org project. There's packages also available for Debian, Gentoo, Arch, and even Ubuntu (although Canonical has no plans to use systemd over Upstart). In fact, originally systemd was going to be used in openSUSE 11.4 until it wasn't mature in time so then it got bumped to the next release. Now that development has begun on openSUSE 12.1, it's time to get the systemd support ready.

OpenSUSE 12.1 will likely ship with systemd as its default init daemon rather than SysVInit, thanks to all of the systemd features it has over the competition. Frederic Crozat, an openSUSE developer, has blogged about the road to systemd for openSUSE 12.1.

The path to switching init managers is pretty much as expected: first manually try using systemd over SysVInit to spot bugs and various issues, then install the systemd package by default, and lastly to replace sysvinit init scripts with systemd unit files.

Converting all of the sysvinit scripts to being systemd scripts won't all happen before openSUSE 12.1, as is acknowledged. Even with Fedora 16 there still are some sysvinit scripts that need to be converted over following the Fedora 15 switch. This is not just a distribution-specific problem but something that should happen upstream.

However, there is a goal in openSUSE 12.1 of having all init scripts on the GNOME/KDE LiveCDs as having "native" support without SysVInit. When installing these LiveCDs, they too should supply native scripts. Lastly, the GNOME/KDE DVDs should also switch over to be free of sysvinit files.

OpenSUSE 12.1 is scheduled for an official release in mid-November.