The systemd madness

[Jay Nugent]

Greetings,

On Wed, 18 Mar 2015, Man-wai Chang wrote:

>
> Are we losing the ability and control to write our own init scripts?
> Are we being forced to work with other people... just like selinux?

   A'yup!   The snot-nosed, pimply-faced kids have lost sight of the UNIX 
philosophy of "Do just one thing really really really really well". 
Systemd has turned into a giant monolithic piece of binary code that YOU 
have NO control over, and sadly, changes CONSTANTLY.  There seems to be no 
end to systemd's takeover of init (which was the goal - for faster booting 
by parralellizing processes), but also logging, time keeping, and more. 
It is almost like a virus in the way it is taking over our free control of 
our own systems.


> I remember how simple SysV init scripts are...


    When I was teaching UNIX/Linux System Administration at a local 
Community College, I stressed the UNIX Philosophy and would quite easily 
teach them the SysV startup process.  The stoodies absorded this process 
effortlessly.  But then when I would introduce them to the 
New-and-Improved systemd, their eyes rolled back, their heads would spin, 
and vomit would spew out of their mouths (picture a certain syfi movie of 
the 70's). They absolutely *HATED* it !!!

    It is madness, plain and simple.  If the goal was to launch more 
processes at the same time to make boot-up faster, then give more 
processes the same S## number.  WTF?!?!  It is EASY to tell the order of 
boot up using SysV - not so in systemd.  It is EASY to tell what processes 
will be [K]illed and which will be [S]tarted in any run level.  It is EASY 
to know what runlevel you will be in at boot time (/etc/inittab) and just 
as easy to telinit to a new runlevel as needed during maintenance.  It 
used to be EASY to spawn an stty at boot time, now it is a major cluster-F 
to do it under systemd, and it only support two modes (single & multi).

    Systemd is making me seriously think of bailing on Linux and going back 
to BSD :(


       --- Jay Nugent  WB8TKL
           Ypsilanti, Michigan


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