The Politics of systemd Part 3

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Split off System76 creates their own OS installer.
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cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

Is there a reason why Systemd can't be forked and made modular so people can choose which parts they want and makers of competing products can make their software interoperable?
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Naib · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 10:55 am Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 10:59 am Post subject:

cokey,

It would be like maintaining an out of kernel module. The fork would forever be playing catchup.
Look how good nVidia is with that.

Have the interfaces between the bits of systemd stabilsed?
I suspect not and if they did, Red Hat would keep changing them to make a modular fork a lot of work to maintain.

It boils down to ... systemd, just say no.
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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those that have never had a hard drive fail.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

P.Kosunen · Guru Joined: 21 Nov 2005 Posts: 309 Location: Finland

Naib · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 4:49 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 5:24 pm Post subject:

mike155 · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 8:02 pm Post subject:

While we are talking about SystemD: Red Hat & friends have announced their latest project: Pipewire. This time, they want to replace .... PulseAudio :-)

https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/09/19/launching-pipewire/
https://lwn.net/Articles/734103/
Same pattern as every time: "we don't want to work with the community, we don't want to improve existing software - we start a new project that we can control"

Zucca · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 9:28 pm Post subject:

Naib · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 9:41 pm Post subject:

exactly. The aim of this is to do to video what pulseaudio did for audio

before the sarcastic "but its rubbish" ... PA had a valid aim, just a poor deployment
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ct85711 · Veteran Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1791

I agree in that I think this new video system is a not a good thing. I'm not even saying anything about who is developing, but the logic for this program. From my understanding, it is being designed to do what gstreamer and other audio/video codec packages does; then trying to throw in security into the mix. So effectively, they want to do is try re-invent the wheel for something that frankly is a convoluted mess with all the video patents and everything . Just to mix is a pam/consolekit setup, try to dictate to the various window composers and applications on how they are suppose to work. To help put the icing onto the mess; throw is network communication and remote desktop communication too just to make it even more of a headache.

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

mplayer is swiss knife of video and audio, big(gest?) number of formats handle. If mplayer have a real challenger, it must be ffmpeg.
videolan primary aim is streaming thru network. It also shine with drm crap, giving linux users ability to play what they have paid for.
and both mplayer and videolan handle jackd.

I would only gives credits to pulseaudio when it comes to multiple cards handling simplicity and flexibility where alsa is a bad player at that.

For video, it would take anyone years to reach just half the level where mplayer and videolan are. As such pipewire video part is already looking dead for me if their goal was to battle mplayer and videolan. Your only "improvement" would be instead of destroying drm crap to play video, you are drm compliant and use drm instead of bypassing them like videolan do (libdvdcss is videolan's baby), best way to make friend with all majors companies that refuse to see a user playing a movie he has paid for.
For audio, you are only left with that improvement over PA: kill jackd supremacy over realtime and pro audio.

For me, it's another redhat goal: adding video player layer tied to wayland, that will miserably fail to battle jackd again and will comeback to pulseaudio backend.
You'll get crappy and tied to wayland video handling instead of mplayer/vlc awesome video, handling sounds with PA (or jackd if they are not totally dumb), and its only goal would be that: getting redhat closing the circle and make anyone depends on their tech: video for pipewire, audio thru pulseaudio, rendering thru wayland, communication thru dbus init and tools thru systemd...
Then if anyone would do "anything" in desktop area, it will always have redhat in front of him.
jackd is a "stone in their shoes", because it allows you to bypass redhat area totally, pro audio server without systemd and wayland will do realtime audio and redhat is totally out of the game.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 12:38 pm Post subject:

krinn,

Nobody ever got fired for buying Red Hat.
Anything backed by Red Hat, however bad it is (remember hal?), has an advantage to start with.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

Question: Gnome past some version (3.6?) DOES in fact require systemd right? I have some AC on soylentnews arguing otherwise. If he just referring to various forks/shims whatever?

Tom

Naib · Posted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 11:38 pm Post subject:

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

I have to deal with rhel/centos 7.x now at work usually on some flavor of HP Z8xx workstation box. The smart folk have started to sneak ssd drives into these guys so I decided to take advantage of btrfs instead of the usual choice anaconda makes for xfs. One thing I'm noticing with the UEFI based installs is the tendency for the necessary vfat efi partition that gets involved into having its dirty bit still set on reboot. It may just be we have a fair number of windows oriented devs who just mash down the power button whenever they feel like things aren't repsonsive enough. However just try to resort to magic-sys-req key when your 7 box locks up tighter then an insurance company venturing into the Carribbean (too soon?). It would appear that systemd thoughtfully "disables" most of the REISUB sequence for no good reason (except for maybe sync).

So anyway.... your box tries to come back up and now you are sitting in a blue screen waiting for some god awful systemd task to decide it has finished. However it never does, because your "dirty" efi vfat filesystem refuses to let it decide that everything remounted! Even worse, you go in to see what's going on, and discover that the systemd "remount" task is some binary doing who knows what. After I ran into this crap once or twice, I ended up shoving the damn thing out of the way and replaced it with what is usually a five or six line bash script that manually mounts the important stuff out of the /etc/fstab. Now everything comes right back up, and when it doesn't, the "rescue" mode on that pig won't come up either so you are breaking out your system rescue cd to fsck the mess anyway.

I don't know why these people think they still need to do a "preen" or whatever they are trying to do with that remount task anyway. It may make sense for an ext4 install, but even their default anaconda set up is doing xfs anyway. I have yet to get an xfs to a sane state with its repair utilities if the journal is kaput. I can get btrfs to fix a fair amount with "check --repair", but I'm usually playing my system rescue cd when that happens

Zucca

Yamakuzure · Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 9:19 am Post subject:

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2017 3:16 pm Post subject: Yep, still not using systemd...

OK, so I thought I'd read up on systemd and whether I should try Debian 9. I would like a binary distro on servers and such since they require less maintenance. Don't get me wrong, I love Gentoo, but it is a hassle to update on multiple systems, each with different hardware. Debian used to fill this gap until they went all dictator on us and rammed systemd down our throats. Well, I left, I didn't take it.

Anyway, after reading up on the state of systemd, I can say that there is no way in Hell I'll be using anything with systemd tied to it. If KDE begins requiring, BSD it is. In my opinion, after reading for half a day on it, systemd makes Linux more vulnerable than a Windows 10 box. Seriously. Last year an exploit was discovered which can cause systemd to hag using only 48 characters of code. This year a method was discovered using DNS packets to cause a buffer overflow and gain complete control of the system! On top of that, due to the fact that it wasn't patched, Debian released compromised versions, and Lennart made some dumb comment about it bot being patched in a timely manner, systemd won top gong in the pwnie awards this year.

Seriously, systemd is a cancer like Microsoft was a while back. Remember that IE flaw allowing complete control over a system which remained unpatched for like two years? This role is now being filled by systemd. There is a patch waiting to be applied. Why is it taking so long? I am used to Linux exploits normally being fixed within a day, not months. I feel for all the admins forced to use RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, or other distros with this crappy bloatware on it.

This is also further proof as to why I can never run this on a server or desktop at a client location. It won't happen. I'd rather maintain a thousand Gentoo boxes individually than put a single Debian box on a client network and risk their data and money.

Oh, then there's this article which I found highly amusing. Enjoy!
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Ever picture systemd as what runs "The Borg"?

rob_dot_p · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2017 Posts: 30

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1065458-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2017 3:26 pm Post subject:

Wow, good thread. I'll read it over breakfast. Thanks!
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Ever picture systemd as what runs "The Borg"?

rob_dot_p · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2017 Posts: 30

It's part 3 already.
There's also a lot of information in the first 2 threads :wink: