
How Debian managed the systemd transition - liotier
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/657345/a0ca846bdcbf6bf2/
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click170
I've been using Debian for about 10 years now and with all the FUD I was
worried about the systemd switch, but its been largely uneventful for me.

The only bug I've noticed after switching to Jessie is that on one of my
systems that has two NICs for some reason both NICs will occasionally end up
with the same IP on both NICs. I need to investigate further to figure out the
root cause but a reboot always solves the problem for a couple days. I'm
confident its not a dhcp server issue.

I expected much more grief due to edge cases that weren't planned for but I've
yet to find more than the dual nic issue.

~~~
Touche
That's good that you didn't experience any bumps in the road, but did you
notice the supposed benefits of systemd yet? Namely faster startup times?

~~~
justinsaccount
[http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-
myths.html](http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html)

Myth: systemd is about speed.

Yes, systemd is fast (A pretty complete userspace boot-up in ~900ms, anyone?),
but that's primarily just a side-effect of doing things right. In fact, we
never really sat down and optimized the last tiny bit of performance out of
systemd. Instead, we actually frequently knowingly picked the slightly slower
code paths in order to keep the code more readable. This doesn't mean being
fast was irrelevant for us, but reducing systemd to its speed is certainly
quite a misconception, since that is certainly not anywhere near the top of
our list of goals.

~~~
Touche
> Myth: systemd is about speed.

Then what is it about?

~~~
digi_owl
Kernel encirclement and owning userspace.

Basically the biggest players in all this has long bellyached about
fragmentation in the Linux ecosystem, and preached the wonders of monoculture
(aka Windows and OSX).

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throwaway7767
It's interesting to me that debian has written systemd-shim, hadn't heard
about it before.

I remember that for a while, the primary criticism I heard of systemd was that
it would make software linux-only because of systemd dependencies (gnome was
the primary example given) and that it was _impossible_ to write a
compatibility wrapper. I guess the debian guys busted that myth.

~~~
pakled_engineer
BSD devs wrote a shim too for Gnome called systemd-utl (now system-bsd) at
GSoC
[https://uglyman.kremlin.cc/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=systembsd.git...](https://uglyman.kremlin.cc/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=systembsd.git;a=summary)

More info
[http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140915064856](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140915064856)
it provides hostnamed, localed, timedated, and logind to packages that have
this as a hard dependency.

~~~
mlichvar
Writing new implementations of the systemd interfaces for systems which don't
use systemd seems reasonable, but I think it's interesting there was a need to
reimplement the timedated interface on a system that does use systemd and
supports no other init.

I wrote a replacement for the systemd-timedated service for Fedora. The reason
was simple, it could no longer control other NTP clients than systemd-
timesyncd (which technically is just an SNTP client). With timedatex, users
can now enable and disable with the "NTP sync" checkbox in GNOME any NTP
client as was originally supported by systemd-timedated.

[https://github.com/mlichvar/timedatex](https://github.com/mlichvar/timedatex)

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iso8859-1
Can anyone post subscriber links to LWN, or only liotier and corbet?

~~~
brobinson
The LWN people have stated that subscriber links are okay because they can
help drive new subscribers who might otherwise not know such context existed,
but obviously they don't want people posting EVERY link. I forget where I saw
this discussed.

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yarrel
I saw my first "restart to install updates" dialog in Debian this week.

SystemD is cargo-culting Windows.

~~~
throwaway7767
So you have not been rebooting when you update kernels up until now? That
might leave you open to security vulnerabilities.

You don't specify which update tool you are using, but if it hasn't shown you
that screen before that sounds like a bug.

EDIT: replying to digi_owl, as HN won't allow me to reply at a deeper nesting
level.

> 1\. you can actually do a kernel update without a reboot now, using certain
> tools.

To my knowledge, none of them are supported by debian, which was what the OP
was talking about. Maybe he's using them, but then, it seems weird to complain
about debian requiring reboots if he's gone to such lengths to prevent that
problem in the past.

> 2\. dbus was a reimplementation in C of dcop, the KDE IPC system. It was
> aimed at allowing desktop programs to talk to each other, not carry the
> whole OS on its back.

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything in my post.

> 3\. drop the attitude. Or are you deliberately trying to derail the topic?

I'm not sure what attitude you refer to, it was not my intention to come off
as hostile. Apologies to the GGP if that's how it sounded. I was merely
pointing out that reboots for upgrades are not a new thing in debian, as the
GGP seemed to be implying.

~~~
digi_owl
1\. you can actually do a kernel update without a reboot now, using certain
tools.

2\. dbus was a reimplementation in C of dcop, the KDE IPC system. It was aimed
at allowing desktop programs to talk to each other, not carry the whole OS on
its back.

3\. drop the attitude. Or are you deliberately trying to derail the topic?

~~~
icebraining
_1\. you can actually do a kernel update without a reboot now, using certain
tools._

Which Debian doesn't officially support, so they can't be expected to write
update scripts for that use case.

