Ranting, especially on work made by the community* is bad, i know but my frustration comes because it has not be like that. systemd is bloat, madness …
Linux has improved on so many front, is better than ever but this pile of crap is threatening everything.
*systemd is IBM, so not really community, so it’s fine :)
I disagree. SystemD was and is leagues better than what came before. Now days you just write a simple unit file and your application will startup automatically with systemd managing the start, restarts and stops. It even handles the logs so you can just write out to std and not worry about log rotation and the like.
Before systemD all applications had to write stupid distro specific SysVInit scripts that handled all of that. People who don’t like SystemD can go back to their slow non parallelized boot times and 500 line distro specific launch scripts but I prefer speedy boot times with 20 line unit files.
SystemD is a major improvement over what came before.
Preach. SystemD and the soft reboot of user space is a game changer for server admins as full reboots are only needed for kernel upgrades.
I do not miss init one bit!
Initialisation instructions written in shell script was hell to audit and threat actors’ playground - systemd gave us easy to eyeball configs instead. Awfully written, hundreds of lines long init scripts spread across multiple directories vs simple units with a few lines (most of which are incredibly short and simple). Heaven.
Got a daemon that takes a long time to spin up? Best go grab a coffee while the server takes 15min to reboot - thanks init. Then systemd comes along and let’s you set a units dependencies so you can ensure the bare minimum needed to be running before your unit can start, simultaneously running other units in parallel… chefkiss.
SystemD was supposed to improve load times? Hmm. The only time I ever compared it was on a raspberry pi. 15 seconds to boot under sysV. 90 seconds to boot under systemD. I wasn’t impressed. However on my servers… well I honestly don’t see any difference at all in the boot times, so I never understood all the hype.
It really depends what other init system you mean, but openrc checks all the boxes. It uses shell scripts, but I’ve never seen any that would be 500 lines long (at least in Alpine). Services can have defined dependencies as well can be classified into groups so you don’t need to configure for any specific service, you can just say ‘depend on dns’ and any available will be run. And openrc also supports running services in parallel.
Alpine is incredibly minimal given its extensive use for containers so I doubt it’d have many services out of the box.
When I say init I mean the original init - sysvinit (I’m old so that’s been called init since the dawn of time).
OpenRC is fine. It still depends on init, parallelism is optional and not standard, and still uses shell scripts (genuinely a bad idea in modern days / I’ve worked incident response and seen how admins never spot a sneaky reverse shell dropped into a init script they don’t understand).
I happily use OpenRC on a daily basis across loads of Docker containers - it’s a great tool in the right hands and super for minimal environments with a single purpose - but for desktops, workstations, hypervisors, or multi-service servers, SystemD really does solve the huge issue of scripts instead of config, dependency hell, and ultimately the problem of handling a lot of low level stuff which most users aren’t suited to handle, troubleshoot, or investigate, especially when things go wrong or threat actors have compromised the system.
Another benefit is, with upstream handling unit config, it’s so much easier to hop distro now and have some consistency with services and networking than what it was like when there was a different philosophy from every distro on things like leasing from DHCP… Saves a lot of time during DFIR.
As someone who has used linux for >25 years and has experienced the madness of SysV init scripts for decades (well, only two, but the plural is still technically correct; the best kind of correct), I have a very hard time to take people who make posts like these serious.
I’m like you, good old init in the 90s on Linux or BSD , we had init, inetd, and like 10 process, no X, it was cool and easy. Init and rc started becoming bloated and complicated sometimes. I don’t hate systemd, it does its thing right, I used Ubuntu for years and systemd without issue. Now I’m using MX that supports both, best of both world.
Try using Windows…
To be fair, SystemD never broke my windows install. Its also never broken any of my linux installs either but yenno.
The post would have been more interesting if you gave some details on what exactly broke, how you fixed it, relevant bugs etc.
SystemD is different and it takes a while to get used to. But it is much better than the collection of bash scripts it replaced.
This is open source, one is at liberty to replace it if one does not like it.
