Why is Gentoo not switching to systemd? Part 2

Message

depontius · Post by **depontius** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 2:25 am

I trust you have no server-class motherboards - complete with IPMI...

tclover · Post by **tclover** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 11:32 am

khayyam wrote:
depontius wrote:And in fact, in recent news there's talk about the NSA getting something stuffed in hard drive firmware.
depontius ... yes, that's the subject of the link I provided (above). The interesting part of it is how it was suggested they aquire the firmware, if the company wants government contracts then the source code needs to be handed over for 'auditing'.

depontius wrote:On the same topic, I've seen stuff on the web about some guy who disassembles and is working at replacing hard drive firmware.
Yeah, I think I read this some 6 to 8 months back ... the problem is, you've got bios/uefi, usb, etc, etc ... so any number of other possible modes of entry.

best ... khay

NSA-Linked Spyware Found in Hard Drives Worldwide wrote:The new platforms, which appear to have been developed in succession with each one surpassing the previous in sophistication, can give the attackers complete and persistent control of infected systems for years, allowing them to siphon data and monitor activities while using complex encryption schemes and other sophisticated methods to avoid detection. The platforms also include an innovative module, the likes of which Kaspersky has never seen before, that re-flashes or reprograms a hard drive’s firmware with malicious code to turn the computer into a slave of the attackers.

NSA-Linked Spyware Found in Hard Drives Worldwide

Fitzcarraldo · Post by **Fitzcarraldo** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 4:50 am

tclover wrote:NSA-Linked Spyware Found in Hard Drives Worldwide

Interesting. Also saw this article in today's e-newspaper:

Sim card database hack gave US and UK spies access to billions of cellphones

Big Brother is watching humanity.

krinn · Post by **krinn** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 3:59 pm

Guys

, you should stop posting links like these ones

, if miroR read this thread

, it might be too much for his heart.

edit: looks like i should had put some

everywhere to be clearer.

tclover · Post by **tclover** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 4:19 pm

krinn wrote:Guys, you should stop posting links like these ones, if miroR read this thread, it might be too much for his heart.

Come on, nobody would be surprised by _actual_ (NSA) "auditings" these days. (And some morrons should stop saying "HDD manufacturers refuse to say if they received a... letter/request." Change the program! that one is too old, dammit.) And _he_ wouldn't be surprised either... for sure. If he's not using M$ OS[+TrueCrypt] (as this seems to be the _implicit_ target here) at the moment, he should concentrate a bit more on D-Bus & crap Kit before it's too late. (Well, he might concentrate on sysd if he switched.)

multix · Post by **multix** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 8:19 pm

Please Gentoo... remain a distro that works without systemd. That thing needs to be boicotted.
Not the talk about hacked SIMs...

Proinsias · Post by **Proinsias** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 10:23 pm

Fitzcarraldo wrote:Interesting. Also saw this article in today's e-newspaper:

Sim card database hack gave US and UK spies access to billions of cellphones

Big Brother is watching humanity.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... mised-firm

Havin_it · Post by **Havin_it** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 10:15 am

Proinsias wrote:
Fitzcarraldo wrote:Interesting. Also saw this article in today's e-newspaper:

Sim card database hack gave US and UK spies access to billions of cellphones

Big Brother is watching humanity.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... mised-firm

me wrote:Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?

[Credit: about 3 comments down on that Guardian article, as expected]

Fitzcarraldo · Post by **Fitzcarraldo** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 12:25 pm

Havin_it wrote:Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?

[Credit: about 3 comments down on that Guardian article, as expected]

The Mandy Rice-Davies clause came to my mind, too.

swirling_vortex · Post by **swirling_vortex** » Mon Mar 16, 2015 1:42 pm

truekaiser wrote:I would like to add that this subject has at least prompted me to try bsd. Which failed spectacularly when I installed xorg without hal support(it's still needed in bsd land) and well.. their package management system won't let me reinstall it..

HAL was removed from the latest Xorg (at least for x86 platforms), so you shouldn't need to enable hald or dbus anymore. You need to enable vt to run X.

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?que ... ormat=html

Code: Select all

In loader.conf(5):
hw.vga.textmode=1
kern.vty=vt

onimeno · Post by **onimeno** » Thu Apr 30, 2015 4:08 pm

After 13 years of daily Gentoo use, I finally got around to making a forum account just to say - How can I help?

I recently purged my system of *kit, dbus, avahi, pulseaudio, zeroconf, udev->eudev and anything else belonging to that cult.

Everything still seems to work fine, which leaves me confused as to why KDE insists it really needs consolekit and polkit for whatever reason. Needless to say my emerge -u world does not work as of yet.

Would that be a good place to start? Ie, remove the hard dependency on consolekit/polkit in one of the kdm dependencies (forget which at the moment). Apologies if this has been asked before.

I'm a developer by trade and very eager to contribute back to my OS of choice to ensure that it remains pro-choice.

PS - That first sentence makes me feel old.

miket · Post by **miket** » Thu Apr 30, 2015 5:08 pm

onimeno wrote:After 13 years of daily Gentoo use, I finally got around to making a forum account just to say - How can I help?

I recently purged my system of *kit, dbus, avahi, pulseaudio, zeroconf, udev->eudev and anything else belonging to that cult.

Everything still seems to work fine, which leaves me confused as to why KDE insists it really needs consolekit and polkit for whatever reason. Needless to say my emerge -u world does not work as of yet.

Would that be a good place to start? Ie, remove the hard dependency on consolekit/polkit in one of the kdm dependencies (forget which at the moment). Apologies if this has been asked before.

I'm a developer by trade and very eager to contribute back to my OS of choice to ensure that it remains pro-choice.

PS - That first sentence makes me feel old.

For a while a couple of years ago I delved into Solid (the KDE device-abstraction component) in order to find a way to make it decouple from udisks and upower and thereby from Polkit. I managed to get partway free, but the results were still not as happy as I would want. After all, since KDE targets multiple OS's, including Windows, there *has* to be a way to change out those lower layers. I was aiming to make a newer lower level, selectable by USE flag, to select the non-kit interface layer. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I could get it all figured out. I did not quite get the hang of the build system, nor did I get completely clear on what was making setup calls to Polkit even though the lower-level code wasn't going through Polkit any more. The fact that build times were so long did not help matters. If I had more time to do it, I think I could have gotten it worked out.

You will have to have D-Bus to make KDE work. After all, that's what it uses for signalling within its components. It's their replacement for DCOP, which did that same internal-signalling thing in KDE 3. I think what you mean (and certainly the thing *I* would want) is for D-Bus to exist solely for the operation of KDE and not as an IPC mechanism for system components.

I'm glad to see you're ready to take up the challenge! I think the first big thing is to get acquainted with the lay of the land of KDE. Since it was designed to operate in systems that don't have the kits, you can be sure that there has to be a clean way to make a kitless KDE. Finding out how is still tricky because KDE is so large and, as I said, something was making a mysterious call to Polkit in some place I did not discover.

Welcome to the forums! What a great first post! I've been using Gentoo "only" nine years, so I'm not up to your record.

Be sure to come back with questions and reports of progress. Those posts ought to go to a different discussion topic than the current one, though.

js08 · Post by **js08** » Sun May 10, 2015 11:30 pm

onimeno wrote:After 13 years of daily Gentoo use, I finally got around to making a forum account just to say - How can I help?

I recently purged my system of *kit, dbus, avahi, pulseaudio, zeroconf, udev->eudev and anything else belonging to that cult.

Everything still seems to work fine, which leaves me confused as to why KDE insists it really needs consolekit and polkit for whatever reason. Needless to say my emerge -u world does not work as of yet.

Would that be a good place to start? Ie, remove the hard dependency on consolekit/polkit in one of the kdm dependencies (forget which at the moment). Apologies if this has been asked before.

I'm a developer by trade and very eager to contribute back to my OS of choice to ensure that it remains pro-choice.

PS - That first sentence makes me feel old.

Try this - most of the important kde-stuff works without *kit, udisks, upower... etc

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-947670.html

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-938680.html

peter-dambier · Post by **peter-dambier** » Thu May 14, 2015 10:50 pm

My first post was a systemd rant as well.

I am afraid of spiders, but I am more afraid of stuxnet and systemd.

Growing older my ability to understand code above a certain size did not improof. systemd is far beyond that size.

From my own software I learned bugs are hiding in the space I dont understand. That is why I am sure systemd must be a breeding space for bugs and malware.

Growing older I must train my brain adapting to new environments. That is why I have choosen awesome and have got rid of both kde and gnome. The other reason is, I am buiding a remote dashboard for our i-MiEV (electric car). I want do do CANBUS hacking and making a video, recording my desktop at the same time. Of the shelf system cannot do that. Only gentoo can.

Running without gnome and kde may be the reason why systemd did not work for me. This is my third experiment with gentoo and this time I am beyond the point of no return. Last time I used enlightenment as my desktop. I am afraid enlightenment does need too much gnome stuff.

Maybe another problem is I have choosen my kernel with the canary stack probe and I have seen some peculiar crashes when visiting not so trustworthy websites. I dont mind my system crashing and I dont mind filesystem checks after that but I do mind malware. I took me 14 days to get a working system again after my experiment with systemd and I do not intend to repeat that experiment. Ok, I am not the youngest and my gentoo system is a samsung laptop NC10 with only 1 gigabyte of memory. Emerging the world does take some days but it is intersting to note that the little intel atom cpu beats an amd with 8 gigabytes on my other laptop running ubuntu studio. That other laptop will be my next gentoo system soon. I am beyond the point of no return after all.

Cheers
Peter

musv · Post by **musv** » Sat May 30, 2015 2:24 pm

County Bergstraße: Ei gude!

peter-dambier wrote:Running without gnome and kde may be the reason why systemd did not work for me.

Systemd has nothing to do with Gnome and KDE so far.

peter-dambier wrote:Last time I used enlightenment as my desktop. I am afraid enlightenment does need too much gnome stuff.

I'm using for ages Englightenment e16. Ok, my login manager is kdm. But I don't have any Gnome stuff installed. At least e16 doesn't have any Gnome dependency.

tclover · Post by **tclover** » Sun May 31, 2015 11:22 am

musv wrote:I'm using for ages Englightenment e16. Ok, my login manager is kdm. But I don't have any Gnome stuff installed. At least e16 doesn't have any Gnome dependency.

E17+ does not as well, there is no hard dependency to GNOME stuff. Although E18+[wayland,drm] require logind... Choose wisely, or rule 'em out. Perfectly satisfied with E18[X,opengl] first after a slightly bothersome E17[X,opengl] upgrade; and then recently to E19[opengl]. Everything looks fine but a little issue with tray-icon... XEmbed is planned to be removed in favor to libindicator. I knew this already for months... still need XEmbed for ladi-system-tray mainly (and dhcpcd-ui in a minor extend.) Still workable with an awfull notification area... Still, almost all major DE are moving to libindicator, nothing surprising. As the move to SystemD. Still Enlightenment is on the move for wayland/drm rendering engines (logind dep.)

szatox · Post by **szatox** » Sun May 31, 2015 2:52 pm

Since this topic somehow appears to still be alive... are you getting closer to any conclusions? Like, perhaps a list of 101 reasons not to switch or something else that can be shown to the folks pushing for changes?

EmaRsk · Post by **EmaRsk** » Sun May 31, 2015 10:57 pm

What "conclusion" do you expect to a question that is flawed from the start on many levels?
This is just a generic systemd bashing thread, and I'm actually perfectly fine with that. I find this thread insightful, so it's fulfilled its purpose for me.

augustin · Post by **augustin** » Mon Jun 01, 2015 1:06 am

szatox's comment has some merit.

A wiki-based article with a summary of our collective findings, or at least a multi-author document drafted by the contributors to this thread, with an executive summary and a more detailed explanation of what's going on.

Mind you, it would have to be something complementary to what already exists:

Broken by design: systemd
http://ewontfix.com/14/
Systemd has 6 service startup notification types, and they're all wrong
http://ewontfix.com/15/
Without Systemd Wiki
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I personally am still worried about KDE, my DE of choice. I wonder how much longer I'll be able to use it without systemd and logind. I don't know of any wiki page that details any of this.

davidm · Post by **davidm** » Mon Jun 01, 2015 2:13 am

augustin wrote:
I personally am still worried about KDE, my DE of choice. I wonder how much longer I'll be able to use it without systemd and logind. I don't know of any wiki page that details any of this.

If it helps I am using plasma 5.3.1 from the kde-overlay and things are still working great with KDE. So we're probably okay at least for another couple years or so.

I have read (but know little about it) however that supposedly Wayland support needs systemd going forward. I'm sure someone will correct me if this is not the case.

One thing though in regards to Plasma is that the sddm display manager (prefered DM for KDE Plasma) is a little wonky without systemd. It seems to be looking for it and without it things can be a little screwy. I notice a 20 second delay before the DM displays (may or may not be due to this) and also the reboot functions required me manually putting in the halt and reboot commands in 'systemsettings5' for those to work correctly. Other than that things seem to work and it is functional.

depontius · Post by **depontius** » Mon Jun 01, 2015 3:26 pm

When I run firefox from a command line, in the xterm where it was started I will frequently see error messages about not finding some "service unit" or another. In other words, firefox or something it uses, seems to want to have systemd in place. It doesn't appear to be a problem, however.

I believe the sstemd problem with Wayland is that it wants systemd-logind, in order to handle console permissions. Handling console permissions is part of getting a rootless display manager. Theoretically this is a good thing, but as I'm sure someone would like to chime in, there is just a teeny sliver of a chance that systemd-logind is not doing this in a secure fashion. This lack of systemd-logind is probably why you're having problems with your display manager.

There is a systemd-logind shim somewhere out there.

Post by **asturm** » Mon Jun 01, 2015 6:13 pm

depontius wrote:There is a systemd-logind shim somewhere out there.

The one from Canonical? I thought that was pretty much dead after some systemd changes. Someone needs to write an alternative logind implementation...

saellaven · Post by **saellaven** » Mon Jun 01, 2015 6:22 pm

genstorm wrote:
depontius wrote:There is a systemd-logind shim somewhere out there.
The one from Canonical? I thought that was pretty much dead after some systemd changes. Someone needs to write an alternative logind implementation...

why bother? the API will just change again to ensure nobody ever gets to catch up... systemd exists primarily for the purpose of vendor lock in, not to solve technical problems.

depontius · Post by **depontius** » Tue Jun 02, 2015 12:04 am

saellaven wrote:
genstorm wrote:
depontius wrote:There is a systemd-logind shim somewhere out there.
The one from Canonical? I thought that was pretty much dead after some systemd changes. Someone needs to write an alternative logind implementation...
why bother? the API will just change again to ensure nobody ever gets to catch up... systemd exists primarily for the purpose of vendor lock in, not to solve technical problems.

You know, if I were retired I think I'd take it on. It would be kind of fun writing systemd-shims, just to make them keep changing their stuf, and drive them a little nuts. I'd also be doing a public service, not with the shims, but by exposing their reactions.

musv · Post by **musv** » Tue Jun 02, 2015 5:31 am

I still put some kind of hope into the Debian guys.

The hestiated for a long time to switch to Systemd. I guess/hope, they 'll fix this piece of Lenna Ware.

Why is Gentoo not switching to systemd? Part 2

How can I help

Re: How can I help

Re: How can I help