No. Rebuilding the entire userspace set of services to be a systemd cluster is not nice. It's essentially redoing the traditional Linux approach, which has worked relatively well for years. There are a number of things that could be split out and made more modular - c.f., uselessd for a more in-depth analysis.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that SysV init is The Best Way. Shell scripts are not the Happiest Place. But I am claiming that systemd is a crummy and overbearing replacement.

> It's essentially redoing the traditional Linux approach

It seems like that's part of their mission statement, given comments like this: "Some day, we will have turned the old crap into a real operating system. :)" -- Kay Sievers (https://plus.google.com/+TomGundersen/posts/eztZWbwmxM8)

Yeah, and they seem to be using Windows as their model of what a "real operating system" looks like.

Both Windows and OS X have a unified management mechanism.

In fact, OS X's launchd was a direct inspiration for systemd because of how nicely it works there. I've wanted launchd on servers for so many years.

OSX is not an appropriate choice for a server, and Windows has limited reputation in my mind since they put the GUI in kernel space.

we should not emulate the things we've overtaken and have a higher server market share than. Something we've been doing before is doing it right, and I believe it's the ability to be dynamic and modular.

Windows is actually used on servers quite a bit, but that's besides the point.

Service management has been a problem on (Linux) servers for a long time. Just because launchd originates on a desktop doesn't mean it's not a good idea.

If there were a couple of competing alternatives to manage your cgroups, sysadmins might not be so peeved. We're used to installing an alternative syslog daemon or cron daemon rather easily. But it's systemd or the highway, in the 3 or 4 most popular distros.

About udev, Linus has had multiple serious complaints about udev maintainership since GregKH passed it to Kay. Don't you recall the async firmware loading issue...

Here's a though: try remembering you don't speak for "sysadmins", you speak for yourself.

I think he speaks for sysadmins. If you are using cgroups at the moment you can write scripts for them. It's a mounted filesystem. The change forces you to use systemd for cgroups as only systemd is able to write to cgroups. The argument is: If you don't like systemd implement an alternative that does this for you. Some for kdbus and udev, netlink...

The article is right - it's not Linux as we know it anymore for better or worse.

That is the change that kernel wants, not systemd.

They want to prevent direct access to Cgroups, other than through a single writer. This change is happening regardless of whether you want systemd or not.

You are right. I remembered reading an article from 2013 that gave the impression that the changes where related to systemd and then it shed a different light on the issues (https://lwn.net/Articles/555922/) but it looks like the features are mostly back and in a better shape: http://lwn.net/Articles/601840/

He doesn't speak for sysadmins. I'm a sysadmin, and I love Systemd.

He may speak for some subset of sysadmin, but he certainly does not speak for us all.

> The change forces you to use systemd for cgroups as only systemd is able to write to cgroups. The argument is: If you don't like systemd implement an alternative that does this for you.

And from the looks of it, this has been done: https://cgmanager.linuxcontainers.org/ as reported at http://lwn.net/Articles/618411/

at best he might speak for some sysadmins. His position does not reflect that of all sysadmins so its wrong to pretend it is.

I'm pretty sure it's Greg KH who's running kdbus these days [0]. At least, he's the one who submitted the patch to lkml [1].

[0] https://github.com/gregkh/kdbus [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/29/854

You mean this Kay Sievers? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/05/torvalds_sievers_dus... - It's basically the buddy of Lennart at Red Hat - at least that is my impression from far away..

systemd may be nice but it's coming from Redhat and cgroups are changed due to because systemd folks wanted it that way as far as I followed that debate...

Yes, we are veering dangerously close to Godwin's Law : not only is Lennart and systemd evil, but everyone who agreed or contributed to it.

Sievers appears to be an unreasonable dick. Gunderson announces to the world that systemd's DHCP client is pretty damn cool. In the same post, he puts out a call for interested volunteers.

Ted Lemon (the author and maintainer of ISC DHCP from its inception to 2003 [0]) asks for the location of the project's source repo. Sievers replies with a LMGTFY link that doesn't even answer Lemon's question. Lemon politely criticizes Sievers for his rude and unhelpful answer. Sievers fails to even apologize.[1]

Both Sievers and Poettering have pretty serious attitude issues. It's one thing to lambast a peer who frequently fails to meet the potential that they've demonstrated in the past. It's entirely another thing to try to score social points with your callous indifference and blinkered bullheadedness.

[0] https://www.isc.org/downloads/dhcp/

[1] Check the first few comments of: https://plus.google.com/+TomGundersen/posts/eztZWbwmxM8

What you've just mentioned here is what scares me most about systemd. Not its tight coupling, not its bugs, not its philosophy - all of these things are arguable and in most cases fixable.

The project being run by people who hold unreasonable and downright odious views who act like, frankly, utter asshats, is a much more serious problem.

The Kay/Linus debacle is something you can expect to see more of from these fine folks going forward. Mark my words. Ask yourself if you want software developed this way running your OS.

I am not sure if you're referring to this, but I have seen so many instances where an individual joins a community and then systematically tears it apart by calmly and coolly promoting ideas that ~51% kind of like and ~49% absolutely hate, through a combination of personality cult and back-room coalition building. I have seen this happen in forums, IRC channels, RPG groups, businesses. It is a particularly insidious type of toxic personality because you can't fix the problem by excising them without alienating and losing a large chunk of your community.

Been there and done that.. what's a community to do in such a case?

It's more like everyone knows Sievers is under Poettering's umbrella ever since the 'debug' kernel flag debacle wherein Kay was banned from contributing to the kernel, and then instead of addressing the issue himself, Poettering came out and made that infamous "the kernel is just an implementation detail" blog post to defend him... https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

No need for personal attacks. I just think the article as some merit and your comment gives the impression that these people are not connected. I just wanted to point that out.

No, cgroups are being changed because the kernel maintainers want to deprecate some stuff and systemd is in the best position to provide the new services.

look at how many people actually contribute to systemd. It's far more than just redhat folks

And if you run gitstats on systemd, you'll see that just 10 people are responsible for over 90% of the code.

But the patches that didn't fit the roadmap dictated by RedHat have been rejected.