Upstart Now Available In Debian Unstable

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Upstart Now Available In Debian Unstable

Steve Langasek of Canonical has pushed their latest Upstart init daemon into Debian unstable. Debian GNU/Linux can now handle either SysVinit, systemd, and Upstart to handle a head-to-head system booting battle...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIzNjk

[89c51]

The interesting bit about Upstart is that Canonical seems to be sticking to it and also -according to LP G+- they want to use it in the user session.

[DeepDayze]

Canonical should really push for adoption of Upstart in order to get mindshare and make people change to it instead of that systemd. Canonical really is the lesser evil in this case.

They can do that by providing an unbiased explanation how Upstart works and how it can manage system boot tasks better. Having an unbiased set of benchmarks can also help and not to mention that having clear and complete documentation of how to configure Upstart.

Mucking around with init systems can be tedious and if not done right it can make system unstable or even unbootable

[szymon_g]

why bother with Upstart when you have systemd? doesn the former has *any* advantage over the latter one?

[DanL]

Why bother with Upstart when you have systemd?

From Ubuntu's standpoint, they've invested significant time/effort to develop Upstart and it meets their needs, so there's really no reason for them to switch until Debian moves to systemd as the default. I can't think of a good reason for distros still using sysvinit to adopt Upstart instead of systemd (unless Upstart's significantly faster/lighter) if they're looking to get rid of sysvinit.

[pingufunkybeat]

why bother with Upstart when you have systemd? doesn the former has *any* advantage over the latter one?

SystemD is Linux-only, and will likely remain like that. I don't think Upstart is.

This is a big deal for Debian and Gentoo, who also support non-Linux kernels.

[szymon_g]

SystemD is Linux-only, and will likely remain like that. I don't think Upstart is.
This is a big deal for Debian and Gentoo, who also support non-Linux kernels.

apart from developers of, let say debian with hurd kernel, is anyone even using them?
or is it just a toy, just to say "look! we can do it!" that keeps everything else back (same was with udev, xfce 4.10 etc etc)?

From Ubuntu's standpoint, they've invested significant time/effort to develop Upstart and it meets their needs, so there's really no reason for them to switch until Debian moves to systemd as the default. I can't think of a good reason for distros still using sysvinit to adopt Upstart instead of systemd (unless Upstart's significantly faster/lighter) if they're looking to get rid of sysvinit.

... so, instead of stopping using their product, that has no benefits over other one, and start using systemd, they prefer using it? that's retarded.

[tmpdir]

Looks like a job for... phoronix

"it's now possible to do meaningful head-to-head comparisons of boot speed between sysvinit (with startpar), upstart, and systemd. At one time or another people have tested systemd vs. sysvinit when using bash as /bin/sh, and upstart vs. sysvinit, and systemd vs. sysvinit+startpar, and there are plenty of bootcharts floating around showing results of one init system or another on one distro or another, but I'm not aware of anyone having done a real, fair comparison of the three solutions, changing nothing but the init system."

@Michael, looks like a job for... phoronix

[AdamW]

"it's now possible to do meaningful head-to-head comparisons of boot speed between sysvinit (with startpar), upstart, and systemd. At one time or another people have tested systemd vs. sysvinit when using bash as /bin/sh, and upstart vs. sysvinit, and systemd vs. sysvinit+startpar, and there are plenty of bootcharts floating around showing results of one init system or another on one distro or another, but I'm not aware of anyone having done a real, fair comparison of the three solutions, changing nothing but the init system."

@Michael, looks like a job for... phoronix

and: "Debian GNU/Linux can now handle either SysVinit, systemd, and Upstart to handle a head-to-head system booting battle."

Just, please, Phoronix, don't run some benchmarks and Declare a Victor. The extended capabilities of both upstart and systemd versus sysv are far more significant and interesting than any potential improvement in boot times they offer.

In any case, just dropping in a new init system - whether it's pinit, upstart, systemd or anything else - is not likely to result in a very significant performance difference, as most of the overhead during startup is the system doing stuff, and the init system doesn't directly change that. Both upstart and systemd potentially open up methods by which a distro could make boot more efficient, but it's still up to packagers of components that do stuff during startup to implement that, it doesn't magically happen. I doubt Debian will carry native, optimized init functions for all its packages for both systemd and upstart, and without that, a performance comparison is still fairly pointless, even using the same distro as a base.

[peppepz]

why bother with Upstart when you have systemd? doesn the former has *any* advantage over the latter one?

It's much simpler, and therefore maintainable, it's well documented, it does its job and only that, it compiles, it doesn't require userland to be changed to conform to its model. As a bonus, it's not developed by people who like to force everyone into using their products.