Re: [gentoo-user] Debian just voted in systemd for default init system in jessie

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 17/02/2014 17:29, Stroller wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 16 February 2014, at 4:41 pm, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
>> ...
>> Whatever problems Red Hat are trying to solve in the Red Hat space are
>> problems that do not affect me, so I do not need Red Hat's solution. As
>> for Gnome, I have yet to see a valid reason why Gnome *must* use
>> systemd; that is simply not true at all.
> 
> I thought this all boiled down to "trying to login to GDM using accessibility functions and a bluetooth hearing aid" (or bluetooth keyboard, for that matter).

That was the classic rationale for "no separate /usr without an initrd"
in udev - the claimed need to have any arbitrary runnable code available
to be run before the entire system is up and running.

Red Hat's reasons for pushing systemd are more fuzzy and nothing I've
read so far tells me we have the full picture. Two things seem highly
plausible:

1. An init system that can use modern features of the Linux kernel (most
often Linux-only at this point) like cgroups
2. Extremely fast boot times to spin up virtual machines in a fraction
of the time it currently takes.

#1 may or may not be desirable, I honestly don't know. What I have seen
is a lot of theory and not much reproducable fact.
#2 is highly desirable if you run massive VM farms; folks like google,
rh and amazon would be very interested. Doesn't really sound like a
valid reason to consume and replace the entire existing ecosystem
though. How many googles, red hats and amazons are out there versus how
many regular joes like thee and me? Why didn't red hat just write their
magic sauce to be non-intrusive? Profit and politics I suppose, I really
don't see a valid overarching technical reason why it *must* be so.




-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com