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Re: [MLUG] What a fight ! The spectacular side of systemd :-)
by Andrew McGlashan 14 Oct '14

14 Oct '14

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 -- re-post to luv-main FYI -- On 12/10/2014 4:59 PM, Timothy Rice wrote: > I guess if the kernel becomes inextricably bound to systemd, then gentoo > will be forced to switch. This would make gentoo less favourable as an > alternative for people seeking to escape systemd, and might furthermore > drive away existing gentoo users. I suppose all these people would switch > to FreeBSD. Would that be so bad? For Debian people, an easier migration path that seems very viable today will be kFreeBSD -- and then if that goes seriously bad too, it is a closer step to FreeBSD (at least a little bit closer). This penned as possible news on kFreeBSD for upcoming publicity: https://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2014/10/msg00146.html - "GNU/kFreeBSD "bits", publicity, status report" - - following on thread of "kFreeBSD future" https://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2014/09/msg00280.html In a nutshell: MATE, not gnome no systemd, freedesktop.org sysvinit, potentially OpenRC later consolekit patched 90% compiled base very usable desktop (not just for servers) I've got to specifically quote this small, but important /delicate/ section of Steven Chamberlain message: <quote> * (delicately!) mention init system, still being a hot topic - no udev or systemd here; I guess that makes us a "traditional" Debian flavour, UNIX-like and POSIX-focused - we did lose GNOME (I think mainly due to logind, but also libgbm) - otherwise, we seem to have all we need; Robert fixed up consolekit - we chose to keep sysvinit as default, but are in a position to easily use alternate init systems; OpenRC looks promising for the future (perhaps usable already?); I guess file-rc still works </quote> *Much* progress from Wheezy, very promising future. A. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (MingW32) iF4EAREIAAYFAlQ6cZkACgkQqBZry7fv4vvJbwEAxAtpPMBqACDd3vSFXuv6H6zQ Drw9TYUKozXny0Oq9x0A+weQ9HtfVA9bCCC70Y1fA31phCn37npBfboOSXJVN9oq =f702 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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kickstarter for anti-systemd
by Russell Coker 14 Oct '14

14 Oct '14

I think it would be good if someone organised a kickstarter to pay people to make Debian work without systemd. If it turns out that equivalent packages for some tasks can't be included in Debian then they could be hosted on an external site. Alternately if there are enough programmers who want to make this happen then they could just start work on it. There's been a lot of talk about people wanting to donate money etc. Kickstarter is good for that, if there are enough people donating then it can be done. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Re: [MLUG] What a fight ! The spectacular side of systemd :-)
by Peter Ross 14 Oct '14

14 Oct '14

From: "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck(a)gmail.com> > Andrew McGlashan writes: > >> For Debian people, an easier migration path that seems very viable today >> will be kFreeBSD > > "We remain gravely concerned about the viability of this port. [...] > the port is in danger of being dropped from Jessie, and [we] invite any > porters who are able to commit to working on the port in the long term > to make themselves known *now*." > > https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/09/msg00002.html I have not used Debian kFreeBSD. A few questions: "Despite the reduced scope" (quoting from above) What does that mean? Actually, how much of the FreeBSD userland is used in Debian? Secondly: I always considered it a bit of "academic value". Do you have "real world examples" of Debian kFreeBSD? Regards Peter

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Re: Is systemd a benefit or a liability? [Was: btrfs :(]
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 13 Oct '14

13 Oct '14

Brian May said, >How many times do you expect the developer's to do this? >What is happening is as more and more people are becoming aware of >systemd, people are raising the similar concerns over and over again.> >I don't think it is surprising that the developers might be getting >tired of having the same discussions over and over again. They could >be spending their time better fixing these problems rather then >arguing the same thing for the x millionth time. >Nor is it surprising that some legitimate concerns might not be >getting addressed to everyone's satisfaction. Firstly thanks to Russell for the response, some good info there, Now I do value your opinion but........ I am trying to make a decision based on good and reliable evidence and I do apreciate that if one spends all the time reading stuff on the net one will never get anything done. The problem from a person outside the immediate discussion on systemd is that there are ___plenty___ of sites running down systemd but I have yet to find a site that presents the pro case in an un biased manner, one certainly cannot rely on its main developers for such data. From my experience on researching information on computor systems such an absence is likely to mean there is no such evidence. Note, Russel mentioned something that does complicate the issue, that is if systemd devs will not except Debians input they may fork it. This changes the situation quite a bit as I have far more trust in the Debian devs than some maverick developers going against all unix traditions. We the debian users though would still like to know debians pro case. If we the general Linux user is expected to make a rational judgment we must have both cases presented in a decent fashion, simply saying most users do not need to know the pro case will almost surely end up in a grave misscarriage of justice. Lindsay

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Re: Is systemd a benefit or a liability? [Was: btrfs :(]
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 13 Oct '14

13 Oct '14

On Tue, 14 Oct 2014 01:25:12 russell(a)coker.com.au said >On Tue, 14 Oct 2014, zlinw(a)mcmedia.com.au wrote: >> Linux is developed by more people than just Debian Developers, I >> regularly submit well researched bug fixes to various projects, including >> the kernels framebuffer code (one of linux's more difficult areas to work >> in). Very much time is spent on making sure >> these are well valued contributions. DD's are not the only ones spending >> time in Linux code................. >Would you like to have a bunch of people whoknow nothing about framebuffer >code start telling youwhat you should be doing? What if they start saying >that such code should be the subject of a democratic vote among people who >have never read it? Such a situation would almost certainly only come about via a missunderstanding, most likely due to lack of information. What I would do though is at least try to give an explanation of what ever understanding was missing. The unknown will always be feared. I will personly listen to all sources no matter how lame as you never know where inspiration or enlightenment will come from, it's possible for an apparent dumb query from an onlooker to give one an entirely new perspective on ones system. To claim one knows everything and not listen is a recipe for disaster. Most will see by the traffic on the topic of systemd on this list that there is a good deal of concern. This concern is brought about by the apparent fact that all sources of info on systemd are negative. No one as yet has set up a site like systemdisgreat.org to give the good side of the argument. If no one using systemd is willing to educate people you simply will have to expect a good deal of oposition. From my point of view comparison's with other unix init systems to systemd is not valid. As has already been said if systemd was __only__ an init replacement there would not be nearly as much grumbleing. The grumbling is largely being caused by claims from some major systemd players that they wish to turn it into some kind of overall system control program (shades of Tron) and it appears Debian will be going along with this philosphy as debian appears to have completely embraced systemd. If Debian is not going along with this and wish to use systemd as an init replacement then the ___DO____ need to say so. Lindsay

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Re: [MLUG] What a fight ! The spectacular side of systemd :-)
by Andrew McGlashan 13 Oct '14

13 Oct '14

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 On 12/10/2014 2:55 PM, Rick Miles wrote: > Apparently they are censoring, to quote: Earlier today... Almost 7.5% of all messages that have made it to all of debian- lists that I am subscribed to have systemd [1] in the subject line since the fateful day of the 2nd March, 2014. That doesn't count the unknown number of filtered messages. This is an absolute disaster for Debian, which will also filter down to Ubuntu and many of the other derivatives based on Debian. Canonical was absolutely against systemd, but as soon as Debian's CTTE voted it in, well Ubuntu decided to crumble and go with the flow. Of course we also know that Fedora/RHEL/SuSE/Cent OS and Oracle are all systemd now. The following quoted section is from an email by "Steve Litt <slitt(a)troubleshooters.com>" of DU list: - in short, we are getting the "Poettering OS" now :( - in his own words "a real operating system" be sure to *watch* the video as referred [2] <quote> On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 22:58:18 +0200 Peter Nieman <gmane-acct(a)t-online.de> wrote: > Didn't Mr. Poettering make it sufficiently clear in numerous speeches > that the ultimate goal of the systemd people was to create an > entirely new OS? Just listen to the first two minutes of the first > youtube video you get when searching for his name: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdRmnSHHVw4 Breathtaking! At timestamp 0:51 he says that systemd is now more than just an init system, it's a set of building blocks to build an operating system. Nowhere does he say that if you accept any of those tools, you need to throw away several tools you've been using, or that if you use certain systemd tools, you need to install many of them. He glosses over the "in for a penny, in for a pound" nature of systemd. It's not a set of a-la-carte building blocks, it's a huge meal. At timestamp 1:35, he says that systemd "feels more like a real operating system". Amazing: here I thought that I *had* been using a real operating system since I installed Linux in 1998. We should rejoice that, after almost a couple decades, Debian is now, finally, a *real* operating system! At 2:20, he states that "we believed the operating system design isn't the right design to have." Then why the hell are they still calling what they're moving to Linux? And what, we've been using the wrong operating system all these years? At 2:45 he says that you tell systemd what the dependencies of things are, and systemd figures out at boot time what to do. Hey, couldn't that be done with a make file, with a whole less code and fanfare? LOL, make boot. 7:19 he says that Debian's in the process of deciding whether Debian should switch to it. And at 8:06 he said Cannonical really hates systemd. So when the CTTE chose systemd, that's the only thing that brought Ubuntu on board, and all resistance was gone. Nice! Thanks guys. It appears that because of that vote, the Linux of the future will be a totally different operating system, and I'll have *very* limited choices if I happen to like the real Linux, instead of the Red Hat fork. How anybody familiar with this interview could have included systemd as an option, let alone the default, is beyond my comprehension. Several months ago somebody referred to systemd as Embrace, Extend, Extinquish, and at the time I thought he was over the top. But that's basically exactly what Poettering says in this 9:31 interview. Everybody should view this video! SteveT Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance </quote> IF YOU WATCH THE VIDEO, it is clear that systemd appears to want to take us down the app store path.... <s>Google</s>SystemD Play Store ... A. [1] 1556 of 20803 messages... [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdRmnSHHVw4 - -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mlug-au" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mlug-au+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to mlug-au(a)googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mlug-au. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (MingW32) iF4EAREIAAYFAlQ6T/YACgkQqBZry7fv4vuRdgEAmJmFj28Zgrfi1Ua+izbNL9V/ KSclJ38e45rTrGwHxL0A/RaIUZV7GyddSwyQz7AlcDgQmNbHW/8fYPzrOWcq+lf4 =YQuO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Is systemd a benefit or a liability? [Was: btrfs :(]
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 13 Oct '14

13 Oct '14

I have followed on this topic on this list and on other places and I may say I am very concernd over the issue. I believe Craig has summed up the current situation well. A couple of further points, one of the biggest complaints over the development of systemd is the attitude of the main developers, ie them taking little notice of anyone else. The second point is the apparent helter-skelter expansion of facilties in a single system component. The more complex a single item of software becomes the far more difficult it becomes to maintain it bug free. The future of linux with systemd does not bear thinking about. The supporters of systemd do not really make me feel any better, as there is little discussion going on. The pro argument apparently being, its good, the debian developers like it so there. This sort of pro argument goes no where. What is debian going to do if and when the systemd developers take no notice of any changes they propose and this appears likely. Website http://boycottsystemd.org/ may be of interest. Its very likely I have installed my last up date of Debian. I will carry one with the current stable while I assess what alternatives are around. Looks to be three options so far... Gentoo Slackware I have used both of these, the third option in the medium term is to stick with Debian 7.x but gradually update system compnents by building them myself. Note, I already do this to some extent, usually running a later version of the kernel, Xorg and Mesa. This of course does muck up the package managment but the does not bother me much. I could of course make my own deb packages, this __may__ make it easier in the long run. Lindsay Linux since kernel 0.96d, who would have predicted it would end this way? :-(

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For those who believe the systemd developers are reasonable and will listen to…
by Andrew McGlashan 12 Oct '14

12 Oct '14

https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/K7ijdmxJ8PF

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Re: btrfs :(
by Peter Ross 10 Oct '14

10 Oct '14

From: "James Harper" >> > Rsync integration >> > >> > Not claimed - no patches yet - Not in kernel yet >> > >> > Now that we have code to efficiently find newly updated files, we need >> to >> > tie it into tools such as rsync and dirvish. (For bonus points, we can >> > even allow rsync to use btrfs's builtin checksums and, when a file has >> > changed, tell rsync _which blocks_ inside that file have changed. >> Would >> > need to work with the rsync developers on that one.) >> > >> > Update rsync to preserve NOCOW file status. >> >> Means: Make rsync work like btrfs send/receive;-) and put filesystem >> specific code in it. > > I'm just testing out some of the deduplication stuff in btrfs, and was > actually a little shocked to find it calculating the hashes itself. btrfs > already has checksums, and if nothing else it could have used them to > trivially reject blocks that are different before calculating a stronger > hash. There is talk about exposing the btrfs checksums to userspace, but > of course that puts contraints on further development as they now have to > consider userspace compatibility. ZFS has feature flags you can test. >> I am not sure whether this is a great idea. >> >> Most of the time you will have the same filesystem on both ends. Then >> you >> can use zfs/btrfs etc. tools. Or rsync if it's not a COW system. >> >> It is more "code polluting" than it's worth I think. > > Maybe. Depends on the speedup. In a lot of cases, the above optimisations > would speed up the processing that rsync has to do, but if 90% of the time > taken in your rsync was actually moving data then you're never going to > get anymore than 10% faster. For LAN links though, I normally just use -W > for rsync because computing changes just adds overhead (I mean you have to > read the file at both ends anyway, and unless your disk can pull data > faster than 1GByte/second you're not going to saturate your 10GBit /second > link so don't bother computing changes. If you got the change computation > "for free", then it's a big win. Yes, that's what you get from btrfs/zfs send/receive:-) You only need rsync if you have to deal with a different filesystem at the other end and then it may help you only in a few percent of the cases. If both cases have a 10% likelihood you start this "layer blurring" coding for 1% of useful cases. >> And if btrfs send/receive isn't stable there is a good chance to >> implement an unstable rsync as well. >> > > (I think) Russell was supposing that there weren't many bugs reported for > send/receive because not many people were using it. I'm not sure how we > got from there to "send/receive isn't stable". >From Chris Samuel today: > Watch out with 3.17 then, there are early reports that it's broken btrfs > send. That may need a bit more evaluation, maybe. Overall I hear a lot of "btrfs is having this or that issues" which I never followed up properly. But it makes me wary. I am using ZFS on FreeBSD for at least 3 years in production now (and upgrade the kernel regularly when needed) without any issues. Besides of early problems with nearly full ZFS and memory which were known. On both fronts there seems to be improvement. E.g. I have 92% full ZFS volumes which are still performing - there was a 80% "warning" in the past, and I run ZFS on 3GB and 4GB RAM boxes and do not see issues. Regards Peter

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Re: The rise or fall of systemd
by Peter Ross 10 Oct '14

10 Oct '14

Hi all, to start with Douglas Adams: "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this already happened." I have this sometimes in my mind if I look at Linux related development. Especially in the area of desktops, btw. Everybody knows that Unix is around for so long because it suffers the "good enough" syndrome. What are the killer features that make systemd so much appealing to change? "Making a boot a bit faster" isn't good enough for such an intrusive change, I would think. What else does it do better? Why do I need a journald (mandatory) if I have already a bunch of syslog services developed over many years? Are there binary logs which are hard to read if things go really really wrong? (That really would be a show stopper for me.) What exactly is the network demon used for? Does it work nicely with approaches as OS virtualisation (e.g. Linux containers with own network stack) I have simply problems to understand motivation and design. It seems to be more than just init. Which "other parts" will it take over? Does it "eat into he kernel" finally and makes Linux a microkernel? Or does it replace traditional userland applications (e.g. syslog) and makes the systemd equivalents mandatory even sometimes unintended? (Let's say: the modern Linux desktop is Gnome, Gnome packages require systemd, systemd includes journald)? BTW: Making parts of a system less exchangeable does not only hurts porting, it creates "single point of failures" if there is a problem. Think of bash recently. You cannot replace it if your scripts have a lot of "bashisms" in it. If you do not have a fix you are stuffed. If FreeBSDs sh is vulnerable I can simply replace it with bash (e.g.) If rsyslogd is vulnerable and there is no fix: Just replace it with syslogd. If systemd requires journald and there is an issue: good luck! Not having a choice makes a system less modular and flexible. This looks very much "Un-Unix-like" to me. Obviously Solaris SMF is there for a while. Being a commercial product it just arrived and was not discussed widely in public. Admins looked, were confused and .. just went on with it. For me it is between "A bit annoying" and "This works quite well"! I did not do too much "cool stuff" to appreciate it. So I do not have a definite well-informed opinion about it. I used Ubuntu for a few years with upstart and was mildly annoyed. But I did not explore it too much. It was just my desktop and it's mostly web browser and terminal multiplexer. No point in getting religious about it. It is a different story if I have to deploy and administrate Unix/Linux servers. To be honest, if I can I choose FreeBSD. If I need commercial support it more or less dictates Red Hat so Debian will not be my choice. Well, maybe I "find" somewhere Debian servers to look after. But it dd not happen to me for more than ten years now I think. But it is more or less likely that I have to deal with systemd in the future, Debian or Red Hat. What are the shortcomings of the existing GNU/Linux framework so it has to be replaced by systemd? I see a lot of cons (Maybe some only because I am not well-informed? Please correct me!) and not many pros. Regards Peter

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