Arch Linux Is Switching To Systemd

[Akka]

I dont think I enabled anything before I reboted. After the boot I enabled (and started) kdm. In the months thereafter I probably have enabled some daemons like networmanager and cups manually. As systemd has graphical target as deafult my guess it should give a working system as default. If something not start as it should it easy to fix it when it happens...

[ElderSnake]

Following the Arch wiki (which wasn?t that obvious since there is no conversion guide from initscripts/sysvinit to systemd yet), I enabled systemd and while my PC did boot fine, I had no sound (no ALSA) and it got stuck at shutdown. So I guess not everything?s ready yet.

(I searched the wiki/forums and didn?t find anyone talking about ALSA or sound problems with systemd. Tried a few things but no luck.)

That's weird, my sound is working just fine. In fact I never had to enable anything to do with the sound, Systemd seems to start ALSA automatically.

But as you say, I guess there must be some bug bears lurking there in certain cases.

[liam]

Funnily enough - I am reading it, liam

Paul Davis isn't involved with RoseGarden, but is the Original Author/Designer of Jack audio connection kit, as well as the Daw; Ardour (cross-platform, Mac and Linux - if you include the Work Done jointly by Harrsion Consoles, their version called 'Mixbus' then there is a Windows port, as well). He has also been involved in some other projects, Notably; he was one of 2 of the original programmers who helped start Amazon.com.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_%28programmer%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JACK_Audio_Connection_Kit

http://ardour.org/

http://jackaudio.org/

I've also via the jack-dev-list heard him discuss other low-level plumbing he had been involved with in the past, although i can't remember all of the specifics (something to do with schedulers, but i don't think it was to do with linux). he is definitely a very intelligent, talented programmer (among other areas of expertise, which are listed in Wikipedia). The guy really knows his stuff.

Paul in the KLANG thread (page 5-7);

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?72625-KLANG-A-New-Linux-Audio-System-For-The-Kernel/page5

cheerz!

Well fancy that. What a small forum we write to
Thanks for the corrections, and links. I'd no idea what he'd done save what I gleaned from his and your comments.
I wonder if klang will be continued considering that the dev didn't really seem able to address Paul's concerns.

Best/Liam

[stqn]

Following the Arch wiki (which wasn’t that obvious since there is no conversion guide from initscripts/sysvinit to systemd yet), I enabled systemd and while my PC did boot fine, I had no sound (no ALSA) and it got stuck at shutdown. So I guess not everything’s ready yet.

(I searched the wiki/forums and didn’t find anyone talking about ALSA or sound problems with systemd. Tried a few things but no luck.)

[ElderSnake]

I just converted my Arch desktop to pure Systemd (not just initscripts compatibility, pure Systemd files. So no more rc.conf etc).

Following the Wiki and being a little careful it's actually pretty damn easy. Now I'm not sure whether my system is ever meant to go bang because of it, but I doubt it, seems to work just fine and all my services and daemons etc are all activated.

Anyway once again that Wiki proves it's worth, it allows just users like me to make a switch like that fast and easy.

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but if it's this easy to make the conversion, shouldn't the conversion of the distro as a whole (i.e install media etc) be just as easy or is there more to it than that?

[Rallos Zek]

systemd, the GNOME3 of init systems.

That quote says it all!

[bwat47]

Yeah, systemd is rapidly killing off any alternatives that don't depend on systemd. At the rate things are going you probably won't even be able to get device nodes created without it in a few years.

systemd didn't kidnap the consolekit and udev developers, they made their choices.

[vertexSymphony]

Another thing about systemd is that it uses the Linux kernel more. Other init systems usually only make use of POSIX calls. Linux-exclusive features are not used at all.

Which is AWESOME for portability ;D

[makomk]

edit: I should first read the link.

+Alan Cox You know, actually we set SIGPIPE to ignore by default for all services we start. Unless a service explicitly resets SIGPIPE so that it results in process termination what you are describing doesn't exist. I mean, we actually tend to do our homework. And systemd is not hard to debug, just not the same way as sysvinit.

This sounds like a good example of something that's wrong with systemd, actually. The way they're making sure that users of the systemd logging component don't crash with SIGPIPE when it falls over is to effectively disable SIGPIPE for any services launched by systemd. For the entire process. Every single pipe and file descriptor in any systemd-launched process no longer causes SIGPIPE, including ones which are entirely unrelated to systemd and which the process is relying on receiving SIGPIPE for. Now, obviously robust applications which rely on SIGPIPE will re-enable it, at which point they'll also re-enable SIGPIPE for the systemd log socket for themselves and presumably any process they start because it was never actually really disabled for that log socket, systemd just made sure that the resulting SIGPIPE was ignored.

Presumably the official solution to this is not to rely on SIGPIPE for anything. Unfortunately, shell scripting kinda relies on SIGPIPE being there, and in fact Alan Cox guesses that the shell is automatically re-enabling it. No problem - just don't use shell scripting for anything that might be launched by systemd, or be launched by a service launched by systemd, or that might result in something being written to the system log.

With consolekit being dead (www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/ConsoleKit/) they don't have much choice.

Yeah, systemd is rapidly killing off any alternatives that don't depend on systemd. At the rate things are going you probably won't even be able to get device nodes created without it in a few years.

[bwat47]

I fully support this, and am getting pretty sick of all the trolls that popped up after the 'announcement'.

Systemd isn't perfect, yes there will be some teething issues during the adoption, but they will be dealt with.

Switching to systemd as the default should make things much easier for the arch developers:

1. service files are much cleaner and easier to deal with than initscripts. they are also portable and can be included in upstream packages, lessening the amount of work distros have to do to maintain them, as opposed to the convuloted highly distro specific initscripts.

2. this will make it easier for arch to work with upstream, especially as projects like udev and gnome start depending more on systemd. for example, what if gnome starts requiring systemd? arch developers would have to patch gnome packages for sysvinit/initscripts/consolekit compatibility. And on that note, a switch to systemd as default will make it much easier to get rid of the deprecated consolekit in the future.

3. systemd being adopted by multiple distros ensures that it is well tested and robust, and cross distro standardization for an init system is a good thing IMO.

4. systemd does have technical advantages over sysvinit/initscripts. the cleaner easier to maintain service files as mentioned in #1, faster boot (high parallelization), socket activation, integrated logging, session management etc...

Yes, in some ways systemd is more complex, but I think it has enough advantages to warrant a switch to make it the default init in arch.