Systemd Is Now One Year Old; Why You Should Use It

[Chewi]

For what it's worth, I am a happy PulseAudio user.

[Delgarde]

I don't know where anyone got the perception that either D-Bus or systemd are somehow geared for the desktop, designed for desktop use cases, designed for fast boot performance at the expense of bloat, or designed to benefit desktops while slowing down servers.

Well, that's easy to explain - because that's what they were built for. D-Bus came out of Hal development, and general work on improving hardware integration with the desktop. And fast boot time was one of the drivers behind systemd - indeed, it's pretty much the only thing Lennart talked about in his original announcement.

That's not to say they're not useful for server environments too - I've been looking closely at systemd lately for it's support for managing daemon monitoring and fallover - but it's simply untrue to say they weren't designed primarily with desktop use in mind.

[deanjo]

Pulse Audio, Pulse Audio, Pulse Audio... What soundcards are you using? File a damn bug report... Out of all the soundcards I have been using it works without a problem.

With Pulse Audio I have experience many various issues with various AzeilaHD, Cmedia 8788, Cmedia 8738's, Soundblaster Audigy 2zs, Soundblaster X-Fi Titaniums, M-Audio Revo (ICE 1724) and Chaintech AV-710's. In every single one of those cases the resolution to fixing the audio issues were to remove pulse audio and then they worked as expected.

[V!NCENT]

Pulse Audio, Pulse Audio, Pulse Audio... What soundcards are you using? File a damn bug report... Out of all the soundcards I have been using it works without a problem. Some had stuttering the first two Ubuntu releases, but that's it. All fixed...

Now because dbus is, you know, aupported all over the place and generic, the only constant in operating the computer is the IPC traffic. Traffic is bufferable and doesn't crash itself, so systemd can track processes and restart it, even d-bus itself.

So what's the freaking problem? Gallium sucks because it's not 100% stable or something?

Progress... inconceivable!!!!

[DeiF]

I've been using systemd on openSUSE for months and I had zero issues.
Just did "zypper install systemd" and everything was automatically installed and configured.

It's the _init_. It should _not_ depend on anything else, especially not another daemon.

But other solutions depend on other things too (e.g. the bash interpreter). Those dependencies can break too.

[peppepz]

I hope it doesn't become another PulseAudio. I can live with a broken audio experience, probably not with a broken init subsystem.

[curaga]

Nice trolling everyone allquixotic, even more tl;dr than usual.

D-Bus is absolutely not exclusively for the desktop! Please understand this. It's a data processing mechanism that runs as a headless daemon; or, more specifically, it's an IPC mechanism. The benefit of having it is that applications that need to talk to one another don't need to invent their own custom IPC mechanism (such as listening on a TCP port over a custom TCP or SOAP protocol; using UNIX sockets to send bytes back and forth; and so on).

That be the exact point! There be many trusted, tested IPC mechanisms existing before dbus, that _don't_ require a fricking daemon. D-bus is NIH, and simply wrong in that it's a needless daemon.

And systemd does -- so what?

It's the _init_. It should _not_ depend on anything else, especially not another daemon.


As for all the ad-homs against fair hardware, carry on

[locovaca]

Transparent restarts are already possible on e.g. Ubuntu, where a `restart ssh` will load an updated OpenSSH server without booting off any existing connections. This is fantastic if you are SSHed into the box to perform an upgrade, because otherwise you'd get disconnected as soon as the daemon restarts, possibly triggering a SIGCHLD in the update process, terminating the update early and maybe even preventing SSH from restarting, making the system inaccessible without direct console access.

I don't disagree with what you said, but any admin worth their salary doing a remote upgrade over ssh will be running it through a screen session, which pretty much eliminates this use case.

[elanthis]

dbus is wasting resources? only for desktops? it's being used in embedded devices as the core ipc mechanism more and more. if your server is choking on the ~1.5MB of memory that dbus is going to consume while my highly-resource-constrained phone can use it just fine with memory to spare then your server is a piece of shit and needs to be tossed in a river. you clearly aren't able to do anything else useful with that machine besides using it for an anchor.

[V!NCENT]

If your computer struggles due to a standardized IPC mechanism thembyou could be thinking about uhm... upgrading your early 90's tech?

And systemd is about managing, tracking, selfhealing processes, where d-bus is the key defence.

If it's broken by design, or rather not there at all; it should be fixed.