Canonical Releases Upstart 1.6

[LightBit]

SystemD (although having more purposes than Upstart) is nearer to the UNIX philosophy: "Do 1 thing & do it well" by ending the micromanagement once required of boot systems Upstart and Sys-V

systemd is everything but the kitchen sink. How is this suposed to be "Do 1 thing & do it well"?

[LightBit]

Solution: have the init system fork, exec systemd on pid 2, and on pid 1 close stdin, open /dev/null, and exec /bin/true. UNCRASHABLE LINUX LOLOLOLOL~!~!!

If you loop fork, exec of systemd, it won't panic, but all systemd's child processes would also die.

[Teho]

systemd is everything but the kitchen sink. How is this suposed to be "Do 1 thing & do it well"?

Because it's a modular set of tools. There's systemd-journald, systemd-udevd, systemd-logind, systemd-readahead and various other components like systemd-fsck, systemd-localed, systemd-hostnamed, systemd-timedated among other things. Each do one thing and one thing well. Only the core part of systemd is runs at PID1 and the others behave and are launched like every other service or a tool.

[LightBit]

Because it's a modular set of tools. There's systemd-journald, systemd-udevd, systemd-logind, systemd-readahead and various other components like systemd-fsck, systemd-localed, systemd-hostnamed, systemd-timedated among other things. Each do one thing and one thing well. Only the core part of systemd is runs at PID1 and the others behave and are launched like every other service or a tool.

Even the core does more things.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/src/core

vs

http://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/viewvc/sysvinit/trunk/src/?root=sysvinit

vs

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/init/

vs

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/init.c

[Teho]

Even the core does more things.

Sure. You don't get the socket activated and heavily parallelized boot process and other similar modern features for free. Still if I'm not mistaken the PID1 part is (mostly) responssible for just launching daemons in various different ways.

[LightBit]

Sure. You don't get the socket activated and heavily parallelized boot process and other similar modern features for free. Still if I'm not mistaken the PID1 part is (mostly) responssible for just launching daemons in various different ways.

So why would I pay for these modern feautures, if I don't need them?

[funkSTAR]

So why would I pay for these modern feautures, if I don't need them?

Then dont pay for them. Stay away. It is free software not forced software.

[bwat47]

So what does a userland vs kernelland fight bring to the table? Nothing. This is about mutual exclusive init systems where one is a complete whack crack piece of deadware and the other is not.

Upstart is a piece of old dung that needs to go away. systemd is the messenger.

upstart isn't nearly as bad/old as sysvinit (upstart was created in 2006 and is still decently modern, but its development isn't very active these days and seems to be in "maintenance mode"). My guess is that if they switch to systemd, it won't be until after the next lts release. Nothing wrong with them staying with upstart for now, but I do think they will need to switch in the future.

[bwat47]

I doubt anyone here will listen to me, but what Canonical is doing in Ubuntu is actually better for system reliability. Developers capable of reviewing systemd on technical merits find that it makes Linux systems less reliable. I do not think that the systemd developers even attempt to dispute this. The issue is that the kernel will panic if PID 1 dies and systemd's design makes it very difficult to avoid failures in PID 1.

afiak upstart also depends on PID1....

https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/160150

[bwat47]

I get it from being a distribution developer. It is what people that develop distributions that plan to avoid systemd have concluded.

Several large distros have already switched to systemd, and I've used a few of them. I've never had any reliability issues with systemd, and these distros haven't had any major reliability issues with it. This screams of FUD. If you dislike some technical aspects of systemd, fine, but no need to spread silly fud like "its proven to be unreliable".

Distros that have switched to systemd just off the top of my head: Fedora, Opensuse, Mageia, Mandriva, Arch, Frugalware.