[Cialug] The systemd Init System

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 4:13 PM, Scott Yates <Scott at yatesframe.com> wrote:

> Specifically, systemd seems to have the idea that all other init systems
> are broken


Yes, in fact they are (IMNSHO).


> and they have taken it on themselves to "fix" them.  The idea
> of a monolithic init system makes me nervous because it throws away 30+
> years of proven ideas.
>

Just because we've been limping along with sysvinit doesn't make them
proven.  And actually, there's a very good chance you're not even using
sysvinit anymore - Ubuntu replaced sysvinit with upstart in 2006, RHEL 6
shipped with upstart in 2010, Mac OS X Tiger shipped with launchd in 2005,
Solaris has used SMF since at least 2005.  I'm sure that there are other
examples that I'm not aware of.  systemd is building on and refining a lot
of what has come before.


> Binary logging similarly bothers me.  Logging systems have been in place
> for years and have been battle tested and proven.
>

Utter crap.  Once you want to do more than occasionally grep through the
log files, you'll quickly discover how broken things are.  First of all,
most programs don't log timestamps with enough precision.  Timestamps that
only include seconds are almost worthless.  Millisecond precision (0.001s)
is just barely adequate.  Nanosecond precision (0.000001) second would be
preferable.  Second, most programs don't log timestamps with a time zone.
When you can reach out and touch all of your servers you wouldn't think
that time zones in log files matters, but when you have systems spread
across multiple time zones, all of a sudden it matters a lot.  Third, most
programs get log rotation wrong, or don't do it at all and leave it to
external programs like logrotate that cause as many problems as they
solve.  Fourth, when dealing with lots of log data, you really want them
structured and indexed so that they can be efficiently searched.

And that's just getting me started...

The whole mind-set of fixing things that are not broken bothers me.
>

A lot of us do not share that opinion.  Early on in the project Lennart
Poettering spent a lot of time explaining why the previous init systems
were broken.

-- 
Jeff Ollie