Is there a recording of the talk that -I assume- was given with these slides?

As long as it's optional for Gnome only as they say, that's fine. I just hope other DEs like Xfce don't simply rely on this being available like with Consolekit, HAL, D-bus, etc that I now have to run on FreeBSD as well.

I'm perfectly content ignoring Gnome, but if every full desktop environment starts relying on this because it's available, then it's not really so optional anymore. (and of course, if the alternative is guaranteed to be no major DE running on BSD at all without this, then we similarly have our hand forced. It depends on who would flinch first.)

I could be very, very, very wrong, but I remember hearing a while back that both Wayland and KDE had plans to become dependant on systemd for its "guaranteed-race-free" startup process.

Wayland is not a program, it's a protocol, so there is no way it could depend on systemd. Some compositors may choose to, some compositors may choose not to.

Compositors choose to, because they need a part of it, logind, to talk to polkit, to gain the proper access privileges to do what needs to be done.

Basically, with Wayland the compositor/Window Manager/toolkit gets elevated to the same level as X11. Meaning that it has to do pretty much everything that X11 used to do for it.

The alternative to using logind+polkit is to run the DE/WM/compositor as root. Not something often talked about, as wayland is supposed to be the secure choice vs X11.

Frankly it feels like Linux is turning into some kind of marketing mess, where stuff is being presented as one thing but is in essence something quite different for those in the know.

I would actually be somewhat okay with running the graphical stack as root inside a jail, if it meant bypassing all of the systemd emulation.

Frankly it feels like Linux is turning into some kind of marketing mess

I feel it's just been becoming a mess in general. They're trying too hard to cater to every possible use case, and there's nobody really in charge of the whole end-product to say "NO" to things. So they completely miss the elegance that comes with simplicity and minimalism.

More and more, I feel the long-term solution for BSD is going to have to be a full split on the graphical stack. It's been lovely for transitioning to be able to take all of my Linux apps with me to BSD, and it's a huge hindrance to eg Haiku adoption, but ... with Linux becoming more and more insular with Linux-only dependencies all throughout the stack, it seems inevitable that this Frankenstein of Linux emulation is going to have to collapse at some point. We could still have GTK/Qt ports, so we could still run the truly portable stuff (Audacious, Pidgin, Transmission. etc.)

Or as a nice alternative, dedicate a TTY to running a virtual machine of a full Linux OS for your graphical desktop.

So they completely miss the elegance that comes with simplicity and minimalism

For anyone following Linux since 2000 at least, this statement is so funny.

X11 was never simple nor minimal. The various init daemons were never simple nor minimal. The mess that is the collection of kernel drivers has never been simple nor minimal. Linux has always been about choice: if you like stripped-down, you go and strip it down; if you like full-featured, you go and pack everything. There is no one-size-fits-all, no single design. Anything else would not be Linux.

The un-linuxness of systemd is exactly that it's becoming less and less optional. We whined for years that X11/Xorg was really a non-optional piece of crap, and when it's finally seeing some competition, we're being saddled with a non-optional daemon that takes over the rest of your system -- and unlike X11, it's not even desktop-only.

Linux has always been about choice

This is wrong. Linux has never been about anything. It's always been only what people have made it; no less, no more.

Viewed like this, systemd is not at all "un-linuxy" (if that made sense in the first place). It is a set of tools written by a bunch of people to solve their problems, and has gained mindshare, users and developers faster than other alternatives, which is exactly what Linux (the kernel) did.

Your only choice is to use it, or not use it, but you don't get to complain if someone else decides to depend on it because they deem superior to alternatives. If you want to keep other software from depending on systemd, the onus is on you to provide a reasonable alternative. It will not work to simply demand that others must spend their effort maintaining code that they have no interest in because you want something.

If you want to keep other software from depending on systemd, the onus is on you to provide a reasonable alternative.

You're saying it as if there aren't already plenty of them.

We whined for years that X11/Xorg was really a non-optional piece of crap...

Does the fact that sshd's X11 forwarding doesn't require to run an X11 -errm- client(?) to run X11 software on a remote machine make X11/Xorg more optional? (Obviously, you do need to run X11 on the machine that displays the GUI, and you do need X11 libs installed on the remote machine.)

Hnnh. I see that the Wayland folks have -perhaps inadvertently- subjected us to another round of "Do you mean Java-the-language, Java-the-VM, or Java-the-Runtime-Environment?" style confusion.

I've always heard things like "Wayland is going to be the replacement for X.org." and "Work on Wayland compositors is proceeding at pace.". Pardon my confusion.

To address my claim, do you know if there is currently a functional, non-toy Wayland compositor that doesn't plan to add a dependency on systemd?

Best i can tell, the reason Xfce seems to assume it is there is because the developers are short on time and thus make use of low level Gnome libs to get things out the door.

Essentially Gnome seem able to throw a whole lot more man hours at various topic than can the rest of the DEs, KDE included. This in turn seem to lever Freedesktop towards them (though Freedesktop may have overly favored Gnome from the get-go).

Xfce already depends on it? :(

I was under the impression they had FreeBSD users on their dev team, and kept it alive, just with some limited features (like automounting not really working) and only relying on a few Linuxisms like Consolekit.

Still on 4.10 though, so perhaps that's no longer the case on the newer versions.

The author mentions using OpenBSD in production. Do any of you also use it in production? I have no doubt that it is used with good results, but I have enjoyed it as a desktop OS and would love if more people could share their experience with it on a job.

I work for an ISP. We use it (CARP and relayd) heavily for HTTP and DNS load balancing in an IPv6-laden environment. Performance is better than that we saw a few years ago under Linux.

Did you also evaluate FreeBSD? If you did, I'm curious what the pros and cons were that ultimately affected your decision.

I did not. I was more familiar with OpenBSD to begin with, and like its slant toward security. Although we do use FreeBSD for a few other servers used as NAS controllers. HAST + ZFS + CARP is great.

I use it as a firewall/router/network appliance OS.

The neat thing is that most of the things you need for that role are in the base install, which is quite minimal.

Given its reputation, I was surprised at how little I needed to do to have a suitable working environment.

Which reputation is that?

The systemd folks have been saying all along that it's just a standardized and stable interface and anyone else can implement that interface. I'm glad to see this, because it's testing the claim: if it's true, that means wonderful things for OpenBSD portability, and if it's not true, we should be more cautious about coding to systemd's APIs.

Read the slides he had a multitude of issues trying to copy the interfaces due to the tight integration of components.

What's more, I expect that his will forever be an incomplete implementation due to to undocumented or poorly-documented behaviors, edge-case or otherwise.

The argument that XYZ has a portable interface therefor XYZ is portable is a bit of a head fake argument. OpenGL 4.5 is also a supposedly portable interface, so is the X Server protocol. To implement these takes years of work with large teams of full time engineers. Mesa has over 1.5 million lines of code and has been in constant development for over 10 years.

At last count SystemD has over 40 "Interfaces". These are not publicly versioned standards. So there is no stable interface to even implement and there is no commitment that these "interfaces" will not change at any point in time.

If the project estimate to actually implement XYZ interface takes years of full time engineers and millions of dollars to complete its basically out of the reach of any volunteer open source operating system project.

I just find the argument disingenuous. Everyone making these claims knows that there is practically 0 chance that anyone but RedHat or another big Corporation like Google or Samsung has the resources to Implement something like this.

What you are stating here is not true.

Take a look at https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/InterfaceP... and you'll see that there are indeed a plethora of systemd service apis. But almost all of them are covered by the systemd stability promise (https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/InterfaceS...) and almost all of them are documented.

So, there is a commitment that these interfaces will not change.

I am aware of the pages you linked to and have on a few occasions tried to look over things. Having read quite a few rather large standers and APIs my impression the "Portable Interfaces" is rather dim. They are disjoint and unversioned notes not presentable portable interface standards. There are also various internal protocols and interfaces which are not documented from what I have gathered.

In short SystemD is an implementation. And as they say in there own documents there implementation is and never will be a portable implementation.

The "Interface Stability Promise" is referring to the unit configuration file format and the command line interface. This is not stability of the implementation c interfaces.

If you want to see a proper portable specification take a look at the Wayland Protocol Specification. There or perhaps POSIX.

So where can I read the standard?

I googled for systemd api interfaces and this was the first thing I got:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePo...

That documentation / list is interesting. They say that logind is fully documented for example. But if you follow the link, you get things like:

    CreateSession(in  u arg_0,
                    in  u arg_1,
                    in  s arg_2,
                    in  s arg_3,
                    in  s arg_4,
                    in  s arg_5,
                    ...

With no further explanation, apart from one paragraph summary of who shouldn't call it.

I remember someone complaining about that years ago already. Apparently nothing changed.

With no further explanation, apart from one paragraph summary of who shouldn't call it.

The CreateSession description states that it should never be called from the clients, but instead be handled through PAM, so assume this is why they don't describe the arguments for this one call, while all the other method arguments and return values are described under 'Methods'.

That's hardly "fully documented" though, isn't it?

What I mean specifically is that they document the client interface only, not the full interface needed for a complete replacement.

Well since it's one single method that's not documented, and they say you should not call it from a client, I assume they want to make it clear by not exposing the arguments in the client api documentation.

If you want to re-implement logind you will invariably read the logind source code anyway, where the call arguments are described.

You said there been a complaint about this, was there a discussion you can point me to ?

They have very well defined documentation for all the stable parts of the API, their code is modern and quite readable. In addition to this Lennart is good at publishing lengthy explanatory blogposts aimed at system administrators. Finally they have done a truly admirable job building a community and explaining the why's and how's of their project. This is evident in the fact that there is now a systemd conference coming up.

If this fails the test, I suggest that it is a marvelous failure which every project should strive to emulate. To suggest that systemd is poorly documented indicates an insufficient exposure to the sad reality of most Open Source projects where "our unmaintained, outdated, bug riddled code base is the documentation" is the best case answer to the question of documentation.

Proper capitalization goes a long way in making a text readable. I had the impression that this presentation was written by a 10 year old script kiddie. Also: punctuation, consistent font sizing. Add a few colors to highlight the code blocks. Headings. Graphical bullet points. Those would make the presentation mch more trustworthy. If you are going to talk shit about somebody or something (without substantiating the points nonetheless) then at least do it with style.

As vezzy-fnord points out in this thread, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10176412 , the author did not post the slides, nor had final say on the presentation format. Instead, quoting vezzy-fnord:

They were in MagicPoint format, so I had to convert them to PDF with a dubious third-party Python script, slightly modifying the MGP manifest in the process. That's probably why the formatting is so iffy.

You'll also note that the author "reluctantly" gave permission. For all we know, it was precisely because the author knew that people would criticize the paper over superficial format conversion issues than actual substance.

I actually looked at the git repo and found the comments are written in a similar style. All lower case and with a slightly rambling feel.

https://uglyman.kremlin.cc/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=systembsd.git...

I find it a little hard to understand too. I am going to chalk this up to me starting to be an old man and complaining about not understanding the youths.