SystemD is blamed for long boot times and being heavy and bloated on resources. I tried OpenRC and Runit on real hardware (Ryzen 5000-series laptop) for week each and saw only 1 second faster boot time.
I’m old enough to remember plymouth.service (graphical image) being the most slowest service on boot in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. But I don’t see that as an issue anymore. I don’t have a graphical systemD boot on my Arch but I installed Fedora Sericea and it actually boots faster than my Arch despite the plymouth (or whatever they call it nowadays).
My 2 questions:
- Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
- Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
In fact, this is a difficult question.
In Linux, it is usually customary to use the K.I.S.S. methodology, In any case, it was once customary to use it. This in some way meant that there were a huge number of applications performing exactly one task. For example, chron only started timers, ntpd only adjusted the time, grub only loaded the system and nothing else. It also allowed you to change the components at your discretion. With systemd this principle was somewhat lost, since one service with a huge number of its own daemons absorbs more and more functions. This is what causes concern. In some sense, if systemd at some point becomes even more monolithic, it will no longer be possible to change only part of its functionality. For example, I’m not sure if it’s possible to disable journald and leave only rsyslog.
On the other hand, the now-forgotten init.V fully adhered to the principle of K.I.S.S. since he was literally the initiator of a set of scripts that could contain anything. If you want, change the user at startup via exec, if you want via su. Isolate the application with any available program. It was as flexible as possible, but on the other hand, the entry threshold was quite high. The complexity of writing scripts for init.V was much higher than systemd.
Therefore, there is no single answer. On the one hand, init.V have maximum modularity, on the other hand, systemd have ease of use.
Sys V init systems were really not K.I.S.S. since it was anything but simple to write an init script in a way that worked without e.g. having the environment of the calling user leak into your script and influence its behaviour or breaking things when called by the wrong user,… Not to mention all the re-implementations of the same functionality and the difficulty of writing an init script that worked on more than one exact OS, distro and version.
Right. But on something more complicated than initializing the usual daemon, systemd has all the same problems. For example, if you have a java application and you want to dynamically manage java parameters and application parameters, the script will look like a pain. something like bash -c ‘java …’ or you will have to call a separate script in the initiator. And then to turn off the shell and switch to the application itself, there will be a whole adventure with pid generation.
But sure systemd really more easy then system V.
if you have a java application and you want to dynamically manage java parameters and application parameters
If you mean you want to auto-detect appropriate values that is no more complicated than the init script was before. You just call that wrapper script.
If you mean you want to turn those on and off as part of your local configuration that is actually quite easy with drop-ins in systemd, much easier than modifying the init script and then having issues with the package overwriting your script with a new copy.
