I don't understand your comment. a DNS server is typically also a cache, and this is what systemd was attempting to provide, without the public server part. It's the same thing that distros were using e.g. dnsmasq for.

What does the kernel have to do with this? No one is proposing that the kernel should have a DNS cache.

GP says 'Linux doesn't have a built in cache'. I presume (hopefully correct) that he means 'the kernel', since Linux doesn't have anything 'built in' that you don't run as a user process. The kernel of course has plenty of stuff built in but (fortunately) it tries hard to stay away from things that can and should be done in userland.

Systemd is a user process and now tries to replicate functionality that we already had a perfectly good solution for.

Since a DNS server is typically also a cache we already had this functionality (and more), simply make it listen to a local port and nothing else. That way you don't need to resort to rebuilding things we already have with incompatible interfaces.

Linux hasn't been just a kernel for a while; it's a kernel with some associated userland utilities that are developed together and normally expected to be present. That's been the case in the filesystem part for a long time; the userland fs-related binaries are developed in sync with the kernel side. Systemd is doing something similar with e.g. cgroups.

Linux develops fewer things this way than the BSDs typically do, outsourcing a lot of userland to other projects like GNU, but it doesn't literally develop only kernelspace code. Imo it's generally an improvement; the situation with trying to get things like cgroups to work together with process management previously was terrible.

This is absolutely true, which is why linux is as large as it is and why you need certain stuff in order to bring up a functioning linux system. As for the filesystems they are modules plugged into the kernel (linked directly so you can boot our kernel straightaway or through a ram disk kludge as modules in linux, not the most elegant solution because technically that duplicates a buch of stuff but nobody seems to care too much) and a bunch of supporting programs, this has been the unix way since time immemorial, I think even the first unix I ever used had fsck.

The reason those have to be kept in sync is simply because you don't want to run fsck on a filesystem that was built with a newer kernel that possibly has datastructures that your fsck (or other filesystem aware utility) accesses directly without going through the kernel. Essentially such programs re-implement a bunch of kernel functionality because they access file systems that are not currently mounted.

Systemd on the other hand (in the case at hand) replicates the functionality of another user process that we already have, know how to use and have hardened over many millions of hours of use. That seems folly to me, it duplicates functionality, makes troubleshooting harder and increases the size of the codebase without actually improving anything.

What's next? The framebuffer? Keyboard interface? TCP stack?

There are no really hard reasons why those could not be user programs. It's fine with me if we make linux a micro kernel but let's do that in a way that we do not need to revisit the last decade or so of security issues and ill thought out interfaces. Once we start to need things like DBUS and X in order to bring up a server we've really lost the plot.

> What's next? Keyboard interface?

I'm afraid so: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2013-Nov...

No way. That was meant as a joke. This is really bad.

Not as much as you'd think, actually. The CONFIG_VT subsystem has been a bane on the Linux developers for a long time.

A userspace replacement entitled kmscon has already been around since 2012, by David Herrmann. It's a totally separate project.

consoled is a minimalistic fallback done by the same person. I'm not sure if it really needs to exist, but replacing CONFIG_VT in of itself isn't bad. Most people will probably still have kmscon primarily.

I strongly suspect that at this point most people will in fact have one of the several tools that preceded kmscon by some years and are still around: zhcon (http://zhcon.sourceforge.net/), jfbterm (http://jfbterm.sourceforge.jp/), fbterm (https://code.google.com/p/fbterm/), yaft (https://github.com/uobikiemukot/yaft), fbpad (http://repo.or.cz/w/fbpad.git), and so forth.

All hail our new systemd overlords. Get with the program, citizen.

> this is what systemd was attempting to provide

Why does systemd need to provide it? I already provides enough things.

Are there any bugs in :

http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

I had great success using that. Both installing it on my own or run it part of Ubuntu's base install.

(And the answer of "but it already provides everything + kitchen sink, might as well provide DNS caching too" would probably not be what most people would want to hear).

> Why does systemd need to provide it? I already provides enough things.

I'm not saying it needs to, or trying to defend systemd. All I'm saying that systemd is providing and alternative to running another resolver.

Because it is the Emacs of init systems.

Emacs is the Emacs of init systems

http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....

Depending in your standing as far as emacs goes, that may actually be something good.

I doubt you will find anyone interpreting this as such.

That's pretty much systwhatemd is doing, except it is just subset of dns server that does caching.

Exactly, so imnsho this is simply wrong and should be un-done. Systemd should do those things that can only be done at init time and/or those things that need to be there and no more and leave the rest of the lifting to those tools that we already know how to use and that have stood the test of time. Otherwise we end up with 2 sets of incompatible tools with one of them not only re-inventing the wheel but replaying a whole bunch of security issues from the past on top.

This is the worst case of feature creep in system land in a long time.

That is a good architectural design, but is in direct opposition to the projects mission statement of "embrace, extend, ..." you guess the third word.

If a group is actively trying to ruin something, noticing that they're trying to ruin things isn't going to stop them. That's a useful strategy with accidents and friendly groups, but not with actively aggressive oppositional destructive groups.

Mostly I'm just angry about having to waste the labor hours moving everything to Freebsd from Debian. Its interesting, but not exactly productive.

Funny, that was exactly my response to all this, if Linux insists on copying the worst of windows in the future then I'll be more than happy to go with FreeBSD. I'm a bit rusty but I'll survive.

Isn't systemd actually doing it the BSD way (everything within one repository and tightly coupled)?

Last I looked FreeBSD used rc.conf but it's years ago.

I don't see FreeBSD's init trying to absorb most of the userland system utilities.

Whether or not it is in one repository isn't really the issue at hand here. It is that a bunch of desktop related stuff is worming its way into the systems to the point where you'll be running a whole slew of new, buggy and sloppy code on your servers if you're not very careful just so that the systemd folks get to scratch their NIH itches.

Everything in one repository, yes. Tightly coupled, no.

And even when in one repository i think you can grab the BSD utils without getting the kernel and whatsnot in one big tar-ball.

If you try to grab say just the dns daemon from systemd you can't do so directly. you would have to grab the tar-ball for the whole of systemd, and then attempt to extract just the parts dealing with the dns daemon.

Damn it, LFS have found doing this for udev so demanding that they have switched to eudev for their non-systemd edition (yep, they now have their own systemd edition going alongside the "traditional" one).

I think we've reached the point where we can start being pedantic about what "Linux" means.

I don't think the kernel developers care that much about what systemd is doing (except for the notorious clash about systemd interpreting a debug option meant for the kernel and crashing the boot...), so you can't say the kernel is copying or doing anything.

The distros, however, are possibly the ones you want to blame for pushing and supporting systemd. Which is actually funny because the way it's going, systemd is laying foundations for a new kind of linux distributions to which distributions will certainly have to adapt if they want to keep it.

As a FreeBSD evangelist I actually like systemd :-P

Right, because it drives people from linux to FreeBSD. Well, here is my take on that: the reason I run Linux is because my desktop runs linux, and I try to keep as little knowledge about systems in my head as I need to get through the day in one piece. Since FreeBSD lost more and more ground to linux when it came to supporting the kind of hardware that PCs (desktops) ship with I ended up standardizing on Linux. I know full well that if I switch back to FreeBSD I'll end up running it on my desktop as well and that's when I will probably regret my move. Let's hope the situation has improved over the years.

Systemd is a cancer, it will end up killing Linux if this goes on unchecked. At least Torvalds seems to (most of the time) know his stuff, the way they replaced the memory management left me with a bad taste but in the end it worked out. What's happening with Systemd is absolutely unpalatable and I hope that Redhat and other distros take note, there are a lot more Linux systems on servers than on Desktops and if they believe that expending all this effort on Linux on the desktop so they can better compete with Windows they might just lose their dominance on the server because of it.

> I hope that Redhat and other distros take note, there are a lot more Linux systems on servers than on Desktops and if they believe that expending all this effort on Linux on the desktop so they can better compete with Windows they might just lose their dominance on the server because of it.

Red Hat is developing systemd. It has nothing to do with making Linux palatable on the desktop, but a severe case of NIH, which to be honest is hardly new in Linux-land.

systemd won't kill Linux. Linux development is out of the hands of hobbyists and enthusiasts now and corporate users and developers don't care about the holy wars. Red Hat ships systemd, Red Hats users will use systemd and that will be that.

RH is pushing heavily into cloud computing, and appears to use systemd to do so (notice the amount of containerization talk there is in relation to systemd these days).

Their existing server customers are likely to be sitting on RHEL7 for quite some time. And i suspect that the workstation customers, mostly military as best i can tell, are in part pushing for systemd. Logind etc after all is heavily focused on multi-seats.

I'm one who you speak of. Systemd to me is just a scarily large attack surface. Working through my servers slowly replacing them with FreeBSD. ZFS raid root out of the box on install! That one really impressed me.

>Mostly I'm just angry about having to waste the labor hours moving everything to Freebsd from Debian. Its interesting, but not exactly productive.

It's scary for me, because everything I've done has been in a Linux, but it's also educational for me, because everything I've done has been in a Linux. If the systemd invasion results in a lot of attention going to the BSDs, it's not entirely a bad thing.

The biggest change will be that you might find it sometimes harder to get exotic hardware to work and that BSD tends to put stuff in different places. Most of your other unix knowledge (userland) will transfer just fine, the sysadmin stuff is a bit harder but learning another dialect of unix is along the lines of learning Spanish when you already know Italian.

FreeBSD always was targeted on running on servers. So if that's where you will run it then you should have minimal issues with drivers. If you plan to run it on desktop it might be more challenging.

Regarding sysadmin, I tend to disagree, I think it is the opposite, mainly due to great handbook they have (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/).

As suggested reading "man hier" is a great way to understand the filesystem layout. I personally also really like clear separation between the system and applications. For example all ports/packages are installed in /usr/local including configuration files (in /usr/local/etc).

FreeBSD is just much more organized, Linux is more of a hodge-podge.

Read the hier man page of your chosen BSD, first. It is a great eye opener. From there OpenBSD and FreeBSD have some great documentation (not sure / no slight intended to NetBSD or Dragon Fly BSD as I have not used them much).

But that's not in line with what systemd intends to be. It's meant to be the standard suite that you sort of plug in as a middleware between GNU and Linux.

Your proposal would require a radical paradigm shift as to the fundamental project goals of systemd, in which case it'd probably become something like uselessd.

There are already excellent solutions out there that have been battle-tested, such as unbound or even dnsmasq. Best as I can tell, resolved has no good reason to exist.