I'm not sure if he is really clueless or just trying to flame wars.

i honestly think he believes his stance is the only correct one. you can see it in the way he answered the questions.

the bit where he picks apart upstart, gentoo, etc., are nothing more than callous, myopic opinions yet he answers them with cheerful conviction.

technical arguments can be made for or against any piece of code. but, he dismisses other projects with a wave of his hand firmly stating that systemd is the "only" correct evolution.

i'm am neutral on systemd. do i think the old init system(s) are the right way? not really. do i think systemd is the right way? not really. would i be fine with systemd in the future? perhaps. would i be fine with another bit of code? perhaps.

but to dismiss the concerns of a large number of community members, to neglect or downright deny bugs and issues, to shoehorn a project into _everything_ while closing your ears to everyone else, these are my issues with the project.

if it works, great. but at least open your eyes and ears and work with everyone.

i migrated my home kit to freebsd from debian because i was having errors. failed boots. crashes. config problems. and i didn't have a decade of old crusty init scripts to begin with.

what used to be rock solid on my hardware became annoying to deal with.

i'm all for change and evolution in software/systems and i don't personally have a problem with poettering or what he is trying to do, but he's doing it in a piss poor way.

I don't get how an opinion like this:

"...to make it clear, I think Upstart actually has its benefits. The source code is very, very nice, and it’s very simple, but I think it’s too simple. It doesn’t have this engine that can figure out what the computer is supposed to be doing."

is callous and myopic?

I find myself wondering why the init is supposed to figure out what the computer is to be doing. That kind of "automagical" behavior is what drove me bonkers when trying to use Windows for more than a games console...

I dunno. If it's able to do what you want automatically that's amazing. If I can just plug the printer in and have it work that's amazing. If I can turn the wireless on my laptop on and it works that's amazing. And so on.

The problems arise when it doesn't automatically do what you want it to do and you don't have a good way of fixing it yourself. I'm not in a position to understand init systems so I will be in this camp if there's ever any problem with any init system. What matters to me, as the end user, is how likely it is to work automatically.

If systemd 'just works', then what's the problem? If systemd is broken... well, that's a problem, isn't it. But from what I've seen a lot (though not all, of course) of the arguments against it are highly political/philosophical and aren't based on whether it's actually working or not.

Hotplug isn't the job of systemd to begin with, though. It's the job of the device manager, which on Linux is usually udev (but alternatives like eudev, mdev, smdev and vdev exist) - udev being a part of the systemd repository and to an extent coupled with it (which will become complete when kdbus is merged into mainline Linux), however it's still a rather distinct piece of software that maintains the hardware database and listens to kernel uevents.

So if your init system is handling hotplug events, then that's some bad design. systemd doesn't stoop that low, though it still has plenty of mistakes - like putting the INI parser in PID1. As an example, even Apple put launchd's XML parser as a separate process!

I find myself wondering why the init is supposed to figure out what the computer is to be doing.

I've never messed with systemd configuration too much, but is it much more complicated than a make-style "how do I get there from here? OK lets do that"?

That's actually a pretty good summary of the difference between Upstart and systemd, with systemd your services declare what they depend on and your runlevel is now a "target" that declares that it depends on certain services. It does dependency resolution just like a package manager does.

The term "dependency hell" comes to mind...

I believe it's not about between magical in the general case, but about how you specify dependencies between services, an area where systemd and upstart work differently.

See the 'On Upstart' section here [1].

1: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

Reminds me why slackware packages do not have dependency resolution, because it invariably breaks. This most often in the sense of X wants Y while Z wants Y+-1. And so you are at an impasse because the dependency resolver can't handle having two versions of Y installed at the same time.

A recent failure of systemd i have seen was related to NFS. For some reason systemd would yank the network down before dismounting NFS.

If you don't unmount NFS before taking down the network, it will sit there forever waiting for that final server response.

Another example was where while mount would happily ignore a flawed fstab entry but mount the rest, systemd would bail on the whole mount task and so halt the boot process.

It's not really "automagical"; it's all quite well defined.

Honestly, I'll take a dozen 5-line unit files over a single "portable" init script that implements its own utility library, or yet another "simple" init script that's 90% standard boilerplate and still doesn't work because the 10% doing the real work doesn't check PID files correctly ("I can't just kill all processes called foo?") ...

Anyway, the point is that systemd models system states declaratively, solves the dependencies and executes the necessary steps required to reach that state, all without explicitly telling it what to do. If your dependencies are declared correctly, there is little danger of misbehaviour. The advantage to this is that parallelization is free and you never need explicit waits. In practice of course there will be misbehaving units and incomplete dependency declarations, but I think as admins gain experience with systemd those kinds of issues will drastically decrease. You'll still be able to run plain old scripts from unit files. I do that on my home server to start containers. since the contained process doesn't background itself and just prints to stdout and stderr, when started via systemd all its output will go into the journal and the tail shows up when I do "service container@foo status".

Analogous to SQL, I suppose something like "systemctl explain" might be useful. There's list-dependencies, which gets halfway there.

how an opinion [...] is callous and myopic?

There have been hundreds of thousands of words written on how simple utilities can form the basis of supportable, complex systems and still retain the ability to be comprehensible. He has dismissed all that as beneath consideration, and he has the One True Vision™ on how Unix should be architected.

Don't get me wrong, hubris and self-righteousness have given us great things: GNU, OpenBSD, qmail, etc. But I don't think anyone would accuse rms or theo or djb of not being callous and myopic.

He has dismissed all that as beneath consideration, and he has the One True Vision™ on how Unix should be architected.

I don't see him passing a value judgement on how it should be done, just dismissing a particular criticism as poorly founded. If you look at the difference between the Unix and Linux development models, there is a point. There are a lot of properties to Unix so it's a bad argument to say "not Unixy enough" when you really mean something more along the lines of "components take on too many responsibilities at once and are too tightly coupled."

Care to point out which remarks were clueless or trollish?

The interview wasn't as bad as I expected from the OP's opinion but this one seems mind-bogglingly wrong:

"What’s typical for Unix, for example, is that all the tools, the C library, the kernel, are all maintained in the same repository, right? And they’re released in sync, have the same coding style, the same build infrastructure, the same release cycles – everything’s the same. So you get the entire central part of the operating system like that. If people claim that, because we stick a lot of things into the Systemd repository, then it’s un-Unixish, then it’s absolutely the opposite. It’s more Unix-ish than Linux ever was!"

I don't even know how you could get this misconception. This really does sound clueless or trollish.

The rest of the interview is of a better quality and you follow his reasoning much better even if in the end you would still disagree with him.

He's talking about UNIX, not Linux, and he's 100% right. Look at the BSDs some time, or the Solaris forks.

The disconnect between the Linux kernel and basic userland has been a criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years. It's part of the reason why BSD has a few forks and Linux has hundreds of distributions.

I'm very well aware of the difference of Unix and Linux. I even smiled slighty as he also could just have claimed Linux to not be Unix and that would have been undisputable.

I actually don't know what you mean with "criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years" in regards to the Linux kernel and the userland.

I know of Linus' disregard of POSIX where it's crappy or doesn't make any sense anymore in his opinion but that can't extend to the userland as Linus doesn't do userland.

Some clarification or links to said criticism would be welcome.

It is you who is "mind-bogglingly wrong". Perhaps you should read up a bit on real UNIX systems.

https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/03

Lennart seems to harbor this very strange belief that developing your software in one repository makes you Unix-like, and that this alone is sufficient entirely.

So by this logic, a standalone Unix kernel is not Unix-like, but a fully integrated DOS clone, is.

In addition:

Then we convinced the Fedora Technical Committee to adopt it, and then Red Hat internal management accepted it for RHEL, and we managed to convince every committee that mattered, bit by bit.

So there was, in fact, a PR campaign.

So Journald is a requirement, and Udev is a requirement. But pretty much all other components are completely optional.

Though for some reason the build system doesn't let you disable a ton of these components by default.

The committers group is quite diverse, and for us it’s quite an exercise in making the diversity of the community be reflected in the diversity of the people who work on it.

This is not as idealistic as Lennart portrays it. See Fallacy #13 here: http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fall...

"So there was, in fact, a PR campaign."

Er, how do you think the Systemd developers convinced these technical teams to use Systemd? With bribes? Sexual favours? Or perhaps, you know, using the software itself?

It's funny. The lead developers of Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mageia, Debian etc. etc. etc. have all chosen to use Systemd. Yet for some reason, many commentators assume these people -- distro technical leads -- simply don't have a clue, and have switched their projects to Systemd because Lennart is somehow forcing it on them.

All these distro developers, people a LOT smarter than me, and putting in more work than me, have chosen Systemd. That says a lot to me, and I'm not going to judge them. I'm still on the fence about a lot of Systemd, but to say that major distros have switched because of "PR campaigns" is ridiculous.

Hold up. Please don't invoke the argument from popularity, it simply doesn't work. The lead developers of major distros, as smart as they may be, do make mistakes (Debian with cdrkit, sticking with libav for too long, the PRNG bug, etc.) and they may not be fully in line with the intricacies and conceptual differences between process management, init, supervision, hotplug and so on. There's lots of misinformation from both sides and a lot of knowledgeable people (like those maintaining powerful daemontools derivatives) have never been ones to proselytize, but stick to their inner circles.

Furthermore, how are you sure the decision to adopt was entirely technical in nature? Perhaps they realized that the incoming systemd-integrated Linux desktop userland wasn't worth the maintenance hassle of trying to avoid it?

The way Lennart worded those sentences sounded funny. He is known to distort and exaggerate when promoting, for which I don't blame him, since his goal is to get his software adopted, but nonetheless. systemd proponents have been all too eager to completely dismiss any political meddling on part of systemd's adoption as totally unsubstantiated, insisting it was purely "technical merits". Lennart's words paint a subtly different picture, at the least.

Most people don't fully grasp the state of Unix process management, so it's no surprise they're susceptible. For example, the only alternatives that have been debated primarily were Upstart and OpenRC. That's a red flag.

The distro developers likely all 'chose' systemd because they were forced to to continue using GNOME, which is the experience people expect as end-users on Linux.

Arch was one of the first to switch and while a decent number use gnome I sincerely doubt they made the choice because of gnome. Arch has a long history of alternative WM/DE It's not likely any individual one could force their hand on an architecture change like systemd.

The Arch switch was a decree from on high as best i can tell, with a very "deal with it" style forum posting.

And i think at least one Arch offshot is not adopting systemd at this time.

I believe there's a lot of worry about systemd because what Pottering is doing is relatively new. To grossly oversimplify; the ecosystem of inits among Linux distros looked something like "sysvinit -or- spin your own." So when systemd comes along and starts getting integrated into damn near everything, there's naturally some alarm. There have been endless flame wars about init systems for almost 25 years now. It's almost unfathomable that every major distro has managed accepted systemd with relatively little drama.

I feel like "the marketing is too aggressive" or "they're being astroturfed" or "they're being forced" are all expected responses to what's going on.

Distros mostly made the switch because,

1 Redhat pushed systemd into Rhel7 2 Crucial system parts were pr'd into hard dependencies on systemd 3 It's base idea and vision which is currently replaced with broader ones was good evolution. (better init system with woos) 4 technically most of these woos are only implemented with it

I am not trying to say systemd does not have it's merits. It has. It is trying hard to bring what it promises on the table. Unfortunately these promises mostly comes with traps like vendor lock-in and forced technicalities on other software like kernel.

It tries to be everything in a single pack with no space for other contenders.

These may be thought as well refuted ideas But I believe systemd cabal has the ability to refute with half assed realities. Like "It is not monolitic. it is modular." Reality it has compile time modularity like it is 70's.Also people report that modularity is oversold.

RHEL actually was one of the later distros to adopt systemd, so that line of reasoning doesn't make much sense.

Crucial system parts were pr'd into hard dependencies on systemd

Can you tell which crucial system parts you mean? The thing with udev was that it's hard/impossible to build without systemd, however there is no dependency on it. The other thing that is brought up in this context is gnome 3, but that was already covered in the interview.

> Then we convinced the Fedora Technical Committee to adopt it, and then Red Hat internal management accepted it for RHEL, and we managed to convince every committee that mattered, bit by bit.

So there was, in fact, a PR campaign.

So, how would you spread a piece of software without convincing people of it?

I'm not sure what's bad about it?

It should be interesting to investigate about how other technology shifts happened before. Were they an obvious revelation or the result of lobby/PR/... ?

Lennart seems to harbor this very strange belief that developing your software in one repository makes you Unix-like, and that this alone is sufficient entirely.

He is saying that a trait of the Unix systems was the development in a single repository. In that particular aspect, a fully integrated DOS clone might be more Unix-like than, say, Linux. This is a response to the people who mistake the "Linux way" for the "Unix way".

The thing is, the aforementioned trait is far too generic - it's a characteristic of how development is structured, and has little or nothing to do with the more technical aspects of the Unix design, which is what is being contested.

It's not just Unix. Development in a single repository has been how almost all operating systems were done.

In fact, standalone kernels have usually been research projects throughout the years. Linux is a notable exception.

There's a lot of complaint about logical fallacies in the comments of this article. Does anyone know what they're referring to?

Seemed like quite a clear interview to me, and interesting to hear a bit of the history behind such a fundamentally useful piece of software.

"if you do an init system but still invoke all the shell scripts and all the other things needed to bring up the system, you’ve only solved part of the problem."

That's exactly what I think is wrong with systemd. If a script bring a speed issue on start up, it should fixed by optimizing the script, use/create another script language with parallelism and higher pref, or even turn it into a compiled program. This is not supposed to be the problem of the init system developper.

In fact the only purpose of an init system is to start executables in a defined order, not more.

This is going to be like X, a huge pile of unmaintainable code, and that's definitely not the UNIX philosophy.

In fact the only purpose of an init system is to start executables in a defined order, not more.

That's where the disagreement lies. I see the purpose of an init system as being to transition the machine from one state to another. Sometimes this means starting executables. Sometimes it means stopping them. Sometimes it involves more complicated tasks.

This is going to be like X, a huge pile of unmaintainable code

That is exactly my opinion of the shell scripts that previously handled networking.

In fact the only purpose of an init system is to start executables in a defined order, not more.

A good init system should also do process supervision and integrate with the OS's resource-management subsystem (on Linux, cgroups). You could do that with an even bigger pile of shell scripts, of course, and some Linux distros towards the end of the sysvinit era have been trying to. But at some point a giant tangle of shell scripts which are full of copy/paste boilerplate and frequent bugs starts to look like not the best solution.

It's not like systemd is the first system to come to that conclusion, either. Solaris dropped sysvinit 10 years ago, and OSX dropped its BSD-ish init in the same year. Earlier than that, djb also wrote an init replacement called daemontools, which was a bit of a step in that direction, though a smaller one. That got some uptake but was hampered by some of the oddities of being djbware (e.g. for years it was "license-free software", and it was only intermittently maintained).

Process supervising is for process supervisors. Init's jobs is to be able to start a process supervisor.

Are there any examples of a process supervisor that isn't also intended to replace the traditional init system? Even systems less ambitious than SMF/launchd/systemd, like daemontools and runit, aim to replace sysvinit, because otherwise you'd have to specify twice, in different ways, how each service should start and stop (though it's possible to set up configurations where that works).

Supervisor, god, monit, circus, etc.

And even though it can handle both init and process supervision, runit has a clear separation between the two tasks. The "runit" program handles init tasks. The "runsvdir" program handle process supervision. And each one is completely functional without the other.

At the moment I'm using OpenRC which does exactly that on top of sysvinit, as are most Gentoo users. You don't have to specify everything twice because init never actually knew how to start and stop services in the first place - with a traditional sysvinit configuration that was all handled by scripts that it started, and OpenRC replaces those scripts.

sysvinit does have built-in service management via inittab(5); unfortunately it is so primitive that in practice it is only used to spawn getty(8).

Okay. So, init starts the process supervisor. Then, the process supervisor starts everything else.

Then all of a sudden, something goes wrong and the process supervisor crashes. Init then inherits all the children, and has no clue what's going on with them, so your system is hosed.

What benefit is there to having the init be separate from the process supervisor?

EDIT: let me just expand on this a bit... Monit and other process supervisors do more than just manage the lifecycle of a process; they can run various checks to ensure that a service actually works. Systemd's process supervision is limited to knowing the current state of the process (running, stopped by admin, failed to start, constantly crashing, or optionally: not responding to watchdog), so systemd in no way makes monitoring daemons redundant.

When the traditional sysvinit starts and stops processes, it actually has no clue what it's doing and thus init scripts need to rely on PID files and other hacks to provide basic functionality.

I would like to know why you think that the process that starts and stops processes should not be interested in whether the processes are actually running or not.

Now you have the process supervisor in your init. What happens if your supervisor crashes now?

So obviously that's not a good idea.

Additionaly it bears the problem that you can't upgrade your process supervisor without rebooting.

So what benefits does it actually provide?

Your second statement misses the point. Your process supervisor can be ultimately stable and never crash, but if it does crash, it's just as fatal as init crashing.

systemd PID 1 won't be rendered prone to crashing just because it contains more than trivial amounts of code. If that were the case, then surely the Linux kernel would be crashing every fifteen minutes, considering how much code it contains.

As far as I'm aware, the only component that can screw up systemd is dbus, and since the relevant parts are moving into the kernel, you won't just be able to hose your system by killing the dbus daemon accidentally.

I have yet to see an argument for process supervision functionality not existing in PID 1, besides simply stating that it must be so. Meanwhile, an init which is guaranteed to know whether the processes it starts (or stops!) are actually running is able to behave much more intelligently than scripts sending signals to PIDs that hopefully correspond to the correct process.

No, your process supervisor crashing won't be as fatal as init crashing, because init crashing is an instant kernel panic under Linux. Also, very few projects are as robust as the Linux kernel or have development practices that are as good, and systemd is unlikely to be one of them.

When the supervisor crashes, which should occur extremely rarely in any case, the state of which services are running is lost, and its child processes are re-parented to PID1, so when a new instance of the supervisor starts it cannot tell which services are running, and which of the running processes belong to which service. During the time the supervisor needs to re-start (presumably init would respawn it?), some of the running processes could exit without notice.

What is gained by restarting then? You'll likely want to reboot to get the system into a consistent state anyway.

Here is a war story of an embedded developer who actually created his own init system with separate supervisor process, and found that it doesn't actually make the system as a whole more robust:

https://lwn.net/Articles/623527/

For a good disucssion of the trade-offs involved see this comment by JdeBP:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8384251

Edited to add: Also, is your comment about bad development practices in the systemd project purely based on statistical conjecture (which would mean it applies to every single project, except of course the Linux kernel where presumably you have personally observed the absence of bad practices), or do you have anything to back that up?

Then the process supervisor can then launch your processes. But then all init is doing is launching your process supervisor. We can just drop a step by providing the process supervisor executable to the kernel. There is no need for init anymore.

So we slowly started doing stuff that all the other Linux distros did, and implemented that in simple C code that was fast and parallelised.

That's part of my issue with systemd: replacing safe (-r) shell scripts with C. Sure, it's fast, but I trust C about as far as I can throw it (and yes, I realise that the Linux kernel is written in C: it constantly has local root exploits, which proves my point). I really wish that projects like systemd were written in something of like Ocaml, Go, Rust, Common Lisp—anything fast enough but safer.

Also, it probably doesn't help Lennart that he looks like the Rolfe Gruber in the Sound of Music…

That's part of my issue with systemd: replacing safe (-r) shell scripts with C.

Because shell scripts are always safe, right? [1][2][3] We used to get root on Android devices by exploiting poorly-written shell scripts.

Also, it probably doesn't help Lennart that he looks like the Rolfe Gruber in the Sound of Music…

Personal attacks won't help your case.

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

[2] https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi...

[3] http://www.exploit-db.com/papers/13199/

While bugs happen in any language, shell scripts are far easier to debug than C. You tend to not get nasty interactions spanning multiple source files in shell, where the bugs tend to on a single line (like in that Valve example, where rm should have never been used in such a careless/negligent manner). On the other hand, are you sure you've checked for all of the potential undefined behavior problems in your C programs? These are far more numerous[1] than many people realize.

[1] https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode...

The part about Gnome and logind vs consolekit could have been more detailed.

Poettering was sitting as co-maintainer of consolekit for some time. Then as logind got underway, the maintenance was to pass to Ubuntu under a new project name. But i can't find any trace of this actually happening.

After that the state of consolekit as a project seems to have been in limbo, until recently when a XFCE dev forked the existing code to github as consolekit2.

Apparently said dev would have loved to continue consolekit in place rather than fork, but the final email list traffic between Poettering and Ubuntu gave him the impression that Poettering wanted to see consolekit dead.

So it may well be that people didn't maintain the consolekit code in Gnome because they had the impression that consolekit was dead and buried.

but then Gnome and systemd devs seems to share a "one true way" attitude.

Oracle actually picked up ConsoleKit and beefed it up significantly for Solaris, giving it true multi-seat support. [1]

However, they did this in complete silence, so very few people actually know about this.

[1] https://hg.java.net/hg/solaris-desktop~spec-files/file/79574... (15 patches)