On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Michael Torrie <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 01/16/2015 01:39 PM, Lonnie Olson wrote:
>> TL;DR Not a good interview, mostly a puff piece that lets Lennart
>> rehash stuff he has already said in blogs, Google+ posts, etc. A few
>> interesting points, but not very good overall.
>
> Fair enough. Suffice it to say I do not share your fears. I feel that
> systemd contains the bare minimum of what it takes to make the init
> system (pid 1) run well. I see no evidence from the naysayers that this
> is not the case. And frankly systemd and other ideas that Lennart is
> working on address some of the core problems with Linux that I've had
> for many years.
I think a lot of people have become used to the "quirks" that surround
the issues that other system management solutions struggle with, and
just aren't aware of the huge variety of uses that Linux is being put
to today and the challenges that they present to system management and
coordination. Keeping a modern Linux system configured correctly is no
longer just an "init" task; it's a full-time job, with dynamic
configuration changes happening all the time. The traditional init
system surely doesn't cut it, and I think systemd's architecture is
far better equipped to handle things cleanly than any of its current
competitors.
In fact, I think systemd will move Linux systems *in general* more
towards being friendly to traditional Unix-style management. Currently
desktop systems tend to rely heavily upon desktop-session managers
that are really only configurable in a user-friendly way via GUIs.
Think of how your laptop deals with being docked, undocked, having USB
drives inserted, or having a new monitor attached. These sorts of
things are currently *really* difficult to handle well without running
a huge, highly-integrated environment like Gnome; or by manually doing
a bunch of reconfiguring whenever there's a dynamic change. Systemd's
architecture allows these things to be far more easily handled via
simple config files, scripts, and single-purpose management programs.
Imagine if Gnome could get its fingers *out* of handling all that
stuff. This would reduce work for Gnome/KDE/etc., and would make it a
lot easier for people who want to run their own variety of window
management and session management software to support dynamic
configuration changes.
But I will be most happy to have systemd stage the startup and network
configuration on the embedded networked devices I work with. Race
conditions due to delayed DHCP responses or odd shell script timing
interaction as a result of network interface changes are *really*
painful to diagnose and repair when you have to unscrew a chassis and
install a serial port to even see what's going on.
--Levi
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