I took a stab at a draft intro section for the fd.o wiki. ---
Systemd manages system startup and UNIX services. In recent years, computers have become more dynamic. Servers are turned on and off to balance performance and resource usage. Desktop hardware is attached and detached as necessary. Appliances must be available instantly. Systemd launches and supervises services on demand. This brings three advantages: 1. Hot plugging. Close coordination between udev, the device manager, and systemd enables the system to rapidly adapt to changing hardware configurations. 2. Rapid boot times. Rather than waiting for services to start one at a time, services start in parallel. 3. Greater control over services. Close coordination between the kernel and systemd provide administrators greater control over services. Systemd accomplishes this by providing a framework for communication between services. Traditional systems encouraged individual services to setup and manage interprocess communication on their own. This requires a set of complex start-up scripts. Systemd provides: 1. Sockets. Consumers don't need to know if providers are present or running before starting as long as systemd sets up and monitors a pair socket between them 2. D-bus. Once started, systemd provides a policy for services to communicate via D 3. Cgroups. Systemd uses cgroups to isolate process for greater control. Systemd is reverse compatible SystemV init scrips and other process management utilities such as cron and at. -- This blurb starts with the problems systemd solves. Then it sumarizes the technologies uses to solve those. Project developers by nature tend to go into to much detail too early. This blurb removes references to developers blogs in order to centralize information at fd.o. >From a communication point of view the first couple of paragraphs on the blog are crucial because many people who writes or talk about the project begin by quoting the wiki. _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
