Systemd, which overlay to choose? How well is it performing?

Message

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Sat Oct 30, 2010 5:30 pm

Note: Please use systemd overlay.

layman -a systemd

systemd-15 and systemd-9999 seem to run well (except for minor problems).
If you have serious problems: emerge -d systemd systemd-units and try to remove EVERYTHING related to systemd: All settings, units... Afterwards reinstall systemd and systemd-units.

Some "tutorials":
if you use systemd overlay you'll have unit-files for most common services. This means e.g. kdm, gdm, NetworkManager, avahi, acpid, dhcpcd, sshd, vixie-cron...
Simply type "systemctl start NetworkManager.service" to start a service or "systemctl enable NetworkManager.service" to activate it automatically at boot!

Info: At least for kdm it's not possible to specify the tty. If you enable it, it'll be always the next available tty. (So if you have getty at tty1-6, kdm will be at tty7). Don't know if it's the same for gdm?!

To follow development look here: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/

Hi,

i've recently added betagarden overlay to layman/portage and installed systemd-9999. It was strange because it wanted dbus-9999 and udev-162 just because of "systemd" useflags. The gentoo-wiki said, that dbus >1.3.2 and udev >160 would be fine and they provide the necessary files themselves.
With systemd I had lots of trouble. The configuration is confusing me. Hundreds of services, I don't know what for. xdm/kdm wouldn't start (even with the tips from wiki). Shutdown, reboot won't work...

Now i've deleted betagarden and added keruspe overlay, now with dbus 1.4.0 and udev 164. Hope it's better than before and at least reboot works without cutting power cords

How about you? Experiences? Tips/tricks?

codestation · Post by **codestation** » Sat Nov 06, 2010 4:30 am

Currently using the keruspe overlay, its working fine so far and i am trying to get as many service/socket/target files from other distros to sastify the ones that i was using from /etc/init.d. About the display manager not starting its because the default xdm.service tries to call /etc/init.d/xdm without openrc being initialized. What i did is remove display-manager.service from /lib/systemd/system/graphical.target.wants then using a native approach:

kdm@.service (from archlinux AUR)

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[Unit]
Description=K Display Manager on %I
Requires=dev-%i.device
After=dev-%i.device

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kdm -nodaemon %I
StandardOutput=syslog

[Install]
Alias=graphical.target.wants/kdm@tty7.service

The you can enable it with

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systemctl enable kdm@tty7.service

And that's it, it must start in the next boot without more problems. There are good service/socket/target config files to use directly or as examples to make new ones from the Archlinux AUR and the Exherbo git trees.

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Sat Nov 06, 2010 5:19 pm

Thanks for the reply

I really hope systemd will hit gentoo ~arch. That would be really an improvement! (And we would get those units and services out of the box,

)

It seems to perform really well (except for those missing services). The default installation boots up to console login in 4-5 seconds for me (incl. kernel). openrc needs at least 10.

How about systemd AND s(oder u)readahead? Would it give another small boost, 'cause systemd doesn't optimize the order of read-events?

Ant P. · Post by **Ant P.** » Sat Nov 06, 2010 8:44 pm

readahead's only use is to move all disk IO to one place; with systemd everything starts as fast as possible, so the disk is already 100% busy. Using it will almost certainly slow you down.

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Thu Nov 18, 2010 6:11 pm

Update!

As I said I'm using keruspe overlay and now there are the USE-flags of betagarden overlay as well. And there's a dependency for "vala" , don't know why?! are some parts of systemd written in vala?!

However: There's a new "feature"

(!!!)
I call it "Press ctrl + alt + del for reboot". As it says: reboot works on gentoo. And it's incredible fast against openrc! I tested systemd (with standard installation, no additional or deleted services) against openrc 0.6.4 (removed everything possible).

Now I'm still waiting for our common gentoo ebuilds to ship systemd scripts for all those nice programs as NetworkManager, samba, mysql, apache ...... at least I think there's sth. with xdm going on. Systemd tries to start xdm but it won't run (don'T know why, I just saw the error message and didn't go deeper).

trapni · Post by **trapni** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 4:42 pm

codestation wrote:Currently using the keruspe overlay

this is now the "systemd" overlay.

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layman -a systemd

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Mon Dec 06, 2010 7:11 pm

Hi everyone!

Since a few days I use the systemd-overlay. Works pretty well!
The only problem is: There's no service for kdm (or xdm ...). I think I saw something like "kdm@" while installing systemd a few days ago, but today there's no such thing.
Was it broken?!

Another issue (or maybe just ugly output) is: sth. like "automounter not found: no such file or directory". It's been said two times at the beginning, but the rest of the process does its job well.

Any information/help?
Thanks

trapni · Post by **trapni** » Mon Dec 06, 2010 7:46 pm

http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/? ... op;hb=HEAD

there is still a kdm@.service.

you need to `systemctl enable` it to let it be installed into the graphical.target.wants section, then everything should go fine.

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Mon Dec 06, 2010 9:39 pm

ah dammit

I looked at "equery f systemd" and not "equery f systemd-units" ... kdm@.service IS there and I can start it with systemctl start kdm@tty7.service
How do I get it "enabled" ? systemctl enable kdm@tty7.service won't work

.. ah ok! systemctl enable kdm@.service works and it automatically to tty7. So it's not possible to SET tty while enabling ?

EDIT: I have several error messages after system start: Most (if not all) concerning kdm
1. Cannot open log file /dev/stdout
2. kdm: klauncher: kdemain: no dbus session-bus found
3. ........ "not connected to dbus-server"

dbus IS started and kdm works, but the messages are there .. !?

trapni · Post by **trapni** » Mon Dec 06, 2010 11:58 pm

benneque wrote:ah dammit

I looked at "equery f systemd" and not "equery f systemd-units" ... kdm@.service IS there and I can start it with systemctl start kdm@tty7.service
How do I get it "enabled" ? systemctl enable kdm@tty7.service won't work

.. ah ok! systemctl enable kdm@.service works and it automatically to tty7. So it's not possible to SET tty while enabling ?

this was the part I did not really understand myself, please tell me if you know more

EDIT: I have several error messages after system start: Most (if not all) concerning kdm
1. Cannot open log file /dev/stdout
2. kdm: klauncher: kdemain: no dbus session-bus found
3. ........ "not connected to dbus-server"

dbus IS started and kdm works, but the messages are there .. !?

this looks like an error I did not (yet) run into and I cannot help out here, but I can recommend you joining #systemd on freenode (IRC), ask, hang around and wait.

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Tue Dec 07, 2010 12:44 pm

I'm using NetworkManager. This seems to take most start-up time. Annoying .... but: it has at least 50 lines output that are "<info>". Not too interesting. How can I disable this (for me) useless output?

Dr.Willy · Post by **Dr.Willy** » Sat Dec 11, 2010 11:18 am

I installed systemd yesterday and after some tinkering I got it to boot my computer. After some more tinkering I had to reinstall systemd and systemd-units and now it won't boot anymore.
Just after the 'Recreating volatile file systems' it hangs and after a while it says something like 'device-sda2/start timed out'. After that basically everything fails to start (obviously).
dev/sda2 is my swap partition.

Does anyone know what causes this and possibly how get systemd into a working state again?

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Sat Dec 11, 2010 11:56 pm

Hmmm...

I have actually no problems with systemd (except sometimes panics with IRQ 19 and NetworkManager), but that's not much of interest to me

During the last weeks I reinstalled systemd several times. I don't use any sort of encryption or RAID or sth. So it's a fairly normal system.

I did (nearly) always the following:

emerge -C systemd systemd-units
and afterwards I deleted everything concerning systemd on my filesystem (e.g. /etc/systemd )
Afterwards: emerge systemd

Which version are you using? systemd-15 or 9999 ? I'm using 9999 atm.

And I've got a question, too: What is gtk USE-flag good for?

Dr.Willy · Post by **Dr.Willy** » Sun Dec 12, 2010 1:19 am

benneque wrote:Which version are you using? systemd-15 or 9999 ? I'm using 9999 atm.

systemd-15 (and gentoo-sources-2.6.36-r3)

Is there a way to debug the boot process?
I know about systemd --system --test but I can't read any useful information out of it.

Edit: Ok so I reinstalled everything from ::systemd and now it works again. Weird, but whatever.

soya · Post by **soya** » Mon Dec 13, 2010 5:51 pm

Where did you get >=x11-libs/libnotify-0.7.0 ? Thanks

Edit: I was using systemdoverlay which doesn't provide libnotify-0.7, keruspe overlay does.

ssteinberg · Post by **ssteinberg** » Tue Dec 14, 2010 3:07 pm

http://gpo.zugaina.org/x11-libs/libnotify

Doesn't 0.7 cause massive breakage? Plenty of packages don't compile against it as I remember.

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Tue Dec 14, 2010 5:39 pm

I'm using systemd-9999 from systemd overlay and:
[ebuild R ] x11-libs/libnotify-0.4.5 356 kB

No problems no dependency conflicts or whatever. Runs pretty well.

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Thu Dec 16, 2010 7:04 pm

Is anyone else using NetworkManager and experiencing a crash at shutdown with systemd?
Everytime I shutdown (not reboot!!!) NetworkManager encounters a serious problem and it take at least 1 minute till power off!
Reboot works well (1-2 seconds until I see my BIOS-screen)

soya · Post by **soya** » Thu Dec 16, 2010 10:25 pm

I've just installed systemd and configured following Gentoo guide and it appears init=/bin/systemd real_init=/bin/systemd does nothing, openrc starts successfully as always as if systemd is not installed. I'm using a custom builtin kernel initramfs to bootup, could it be the problem? Could it be tat the initramfs init file is ignoring init=/bin/systemd ? Or kernel should take care about it?
Thanks

soya · Post by **soya** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 7:26 am

Solved modifying my initramfs's init script. There i had a hardcoded real_init=/sbin/init. Then systemd failed to load some necessary modules to mount /home /usr/portage etc but it also didn't seem to be faster than openrc. I mustalso say i didn't apreciate much difference between openrc and baselayout1 init system as i have a really minimal and tuned init+bzImage.

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 7:13 pm

That's strange. My systemd boots up to kdm within 15sec incl. avahi and NetworkManager...
With openrc it always took at least 25-30 secs
For a successful boot you need automounter v4 (which is in real v5) and automounted /dev in kernel (as gentoo-wiki hopefully told you

)

soya · Post by **soya** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 10:27 pm

I'm currently taking a look to it all, because i'm getting lots of errors using systemd. I could get to tty and successfully login but then a had to start servies manually due to error, i'm getting an automounter error and i havautomounter v4 builtin kernel for "years". Maybe the slownes is due to the errors...

soya · Post by **soya** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 11:08 pm

Right now i'm trying to solve automounter issues. Everything compile with +sysv +systemd and openrc still remains there. I'm on fake raid0 and need lvm service to start to populate /dev/mapper/ Running kernel 2.6.36-r2

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systemd[1]: systemd 15 running in system mode. (-PAM -LIBWRAP -AUDIT -SELINUX +SYSVINIT -LIBCRYPTSETUP; gentoo)
systemd[1]: /sbin/modprobe failed with error code 1.
systemd[1]: Set hostname to <PauPC>.
systemd[1]: Failed to initialize automounter: No such file or directory
systemd[1]: Unit sys-kernel-security.automount entered failed state.
systemd[1]: Failed to initialize automounter: No such file or directory
systemd[1]: Unit sys-kernel-debug.automount entered failed state.
systemd[1]: lvm.service: main process exited, code=exited, status=1
systemd[1]: Unit lvm.service entered failed state.
/etc/init.d/lvm[1419]: WARNING: lvm has already been started
udev[1427]: starting version 164

i can't find that in kernel opts:

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CONFIG_FANOTIFY:	 is not set when it should be.

benneque · Post by **benneque** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 1:03 am

Ah ok. THOSE automounter errors... yeah I get those too, but systemd and my system start and run well!
Maybe your trouble is because of lvm ?! I don't use it, though don't know

The FANOTIFY was part of 2.6.36, but was deleted afterwards because of some trouble. I get this error, too, and have no problems ^^

My installation looks like this:
[ebuild R ] sys-apps/systemd-9999 USE="pam tcpwrap -audit -gtk (-selinux) -sysv" 0 kB [1]

I don't know what tcpwrap is for, but I don't need sysv (or do you because of lvm?)

Maybe you have the possibility to run without you fake raid? Maybe this solves some problems?
Another way could be to install systemd-9999 (that's what I'm using actually)

soya · Post by **soya** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 10:39 am

Hi, thx for the reply. Automountser issues may be due to lvm, i don't know but it's really a pain as was trying to setup systemd with USE="-sysv" and remove openrc. Right now i have systemd-9999 with USE"sysv". I would really need to know why is automounter failing and what's supposed to do as kernel help says it's for automounting remote FS. LVM is a must on my setup as i need it for mounting the rest of the system which is stored on a raid0. I think i'll have to leave systemd till they solve that issues those errors are no normal.