On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 09:52:45AM +0200, Guido Berhoerster wrote:
Yeah it sucks, and it has for a long time compared to its alternatives and I'm also familiar with SMF on Solaris, rc on FeeBSD and its modernization efforts[1], as well as upstart on Ubuntu. I'd still be interested in the reasoning why we have to switch right now and why it has to be systemd.
Why now? Upstream claimed it is enough stable and feature complete, it has been already released in Fedora 15, so will be here any better time in future? And of course, having it enabled by default earlier in Factory would help with bugfixing a lot. From administrator point of view is the most important it provides the simple access to majority Linux features - cpu schedulers, io scheduling, cgroups, pam, process namespaces and so and so [1] With systemd you can disable, change or override the vendor suppliend service. Nothing will prevents you to create your own sshd.service, which will be never replaced on package upgrade like /etc/init.d/sshd. Having the same way how the service is started independently on the way how the start is triggered is unique - now you have to maintain init script and (x)inetd configuration file separate. With systemd whatever-activation will turn on the same .service file. Usage of cgroups makes the system much robust and prevents you from mistakes like killall in one init script will kill all instances of daemon. And with the easy of creating your own variants of init scripts, you can very easy maintain more instances of one service. And yes, when the whole logic of service run/start/restart is now a part of systemd, so no need to reimplement it again and again. There are of course more features, like socket-based activation, paralel start, no need of fork, clean execution environment, having a great cross-distro consolidation [2] (because it contains tools like) and so, but I hope this is enough for you. [1] http://0pointer.de/public/systemd-man/systemd.exec.html [2] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-new-configuration-files.html Regards Michal Vyskocil