Ubuntu Systemd Plans: Will Be Default By Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Systemd Plans: Will Be Default By Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Now that Ubuntu has pledged support to systemd moving forward in place of their in-house Upstart project, developers are starting to figure out the systemd migration path...

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

[missionaccomplished]

Nice to see Ubuntu moving things forward

Had to chuckle a bit watching Steve Langasek discussing systemd after he had voted against it as the next Debian init. No matter what the purists say, systemd turned out to be the better init system; Upstart had potential, but development stagnated and major issues were never dealt with. Anyone know when systemd will be introduced as the default init in Ubuntu? The sooner they rip out Upstart code, the better; they can focus more on Mir and other technologies that could make Ubuntu an even better distro than it already is.

[pdffs]

The link to the session notes points back to the Phoronix article.

[carewolf]

With this and the Mir story, I guess 16.04 is the new Ubuntu pie in the sky? The date they put on anything they don't know when they can have finished?

[GreatEmerald]

With this and the Mir story, I guess 16.04 is the new Ubuntu pie in the sky? The date they put on anything they don't know when they can have finished?

This is "by", Mir is "in".

[smorovic]

Wow, this is in two years. Is it really going to take this long to migrate? I'd say a few months should be enough to get it done. And they basically have most of the work already done in Fedora and other systemd distributions.

[GreatEmerald]

Wow, this is in two years. Is it really going to take this long to migrate? I'd say a few months should be enough to get it done. And they basically have most of the work already done in Fedora and other systemd distributions.

Again, "by" means "at the time between now and the date mentioned", so if things go extremely well it could even be in 14.10.

[nerdopolis]

The link to the session notes points back to the Phoronix article.

And the link still isn't fixed. Can anyone find the oeiginal link?

[Spittie]

Wow, this is in two years. Is it really going to take this long to migrate? I'd say a few months should be enough to get it done. And they basically have most of the work already done in Fedora and other systemd distributions.

They're waiting for Debian to do the job, so that they can copy/paste it

[Luke]

Let's just hope they get the migration path right.

They're waiting for Debian to do the job, so that they can copy/paste it

The real issue will be figuring out the migration path for those who are not reinstalling. This probably means some way of ensuring that packages that are started by Upstart still work until they get updated. Fortunately most top level apps (seemingly ALL that I have) do not install files in /etc/init with Upstart, thus should be init system agnostic.

It's system packages that will be the issue here, all the DE's will need to cope with this at the same time. Fortunately it seems that the display managers handle them, and once lightdm/gdm/kdm/whatever is opened by init the DE's don't seem to rely on the init system any further, I've got Cinnamon, gnome-shell, IceWM, and KDE all installed, and don't see anything in /etc/init that appears to be from any of them.

If things get ugly, an upstart compatability job like the currents sysVinit compatability job might be a workaround, but the now global Linux transition to systemd should put pressure on system software developers to get off Upstart fast once it is deprecated.

If they do this right, it should be possible to pin the init system when the changes begin, unpin it when the system packages that are started by init are ready, and get an upgrade that works. Certainly I would take a fresh OS snapshot (a dd copy of the root partition) just before starting an init system changeover.

I will have to learn enough about sytemd myself to rewrite my boot message scripts that give notice in Plymouth of disk mounting events. Right now they are Upstart conf files in /etc/init. SysVinit can't do the same job as it does not respond to external events, I will need a way to write the files for systemd to detect mounting of a disk and run plymouth-message