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A comment on Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux.

Re:Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux by johnea on Sunday November 03, 2024 @06:03PM (#42036829)
The article fails to mention another aspect of systemd that interferes with emmbedded dvelopment: it's utility applications (primarily systemctl, but all the others as well) are intended to be run on the booted system for which the control is being performed.

When configuring boot media, like an SD card, for an embedded ssystem that is not the running system where the configuration is occurring, this is an impediment. There is systemd-firstboot, etc, but this is not as convenient as just being able to set config options on the mounted (non-booted) embeddded media.

I've never liked it, I still don't like it, and I think the number of people in this camp is understated by the article.

However, I am still running it. As other posts have mentioned, switching distributions is a major hasstle, especially if you've built tools using the distro's architecture. For me, this is archlinux.

Although, I am in the process of testing and migrating to void linux. Which is systemd free, and hosts ARM and x86 binary package repositories.

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Re:Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux by stefanha on Sunday November 03, 2024 @06:27PM (#42036980)
Can you be specific about what cannot be configured on mounted embedded media?

systemd follows the drop-in config file model where configuration snippets are placed into directories (like .d/ directories in Debian). It should not be necessary to run utilities from the target system in order to configure it on mounted media.

Drop unit files for services, sockets, filesystem mounts, timers, etc onto the mounted media and they will be detected when the target system boots.

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Re:Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux by blucaz on Sunday November 03, 2024 @08:26PM (#42037590)
> When configuring boot media, like an SD card, for an embedded ssystem that is not the running system where the configuration is occurring, this is an impediment. There is systemd-firstboot, etc, but this is not as convenient as just being able to set config options on the mounted (non-booted) embeddded media.

systemctl --root /path/to/sd/card/ <...>

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Re:Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux by poettering on Tuesday November 05, 2024 @04:14PM (#42055223)
Most of our tools that adjust files work really well offline. systemd-tmpfiles, systemd-sysusers, systemctl and so on all support --root= and --image=.

I really don't know what the problem is suppoaed to be.

Lennart

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