Comment by cedws
9 days ago
We made heavy use of systemd and its related components on a fleet of a few thousand edge devices and it worked great for us. Occasionally, we would run into bugs or confusing behaviour and have to dig through GitHub issues, but that was far outweighed by the problems it took care of for us.
systemd does a lot more than just init. You can preach about whatever alternative inits all you like, but they don't do even 10% of what systemd does.
> systemd does a lot more than just init. You can preach about whatever alternative inits all you like, but they don't do even 10% of what systemd does.
I didn't mean to preach about alternative inits.
My personal criticism of systemd is that it tries to take over everything, limiting the choice.
I want to have a choice, that's all. And systemd doesn't do anything to help there.
Can you give concrete examples?
systemd-resolved: can be disabled and replaced with your DNS resolver of choice
systemd-timesyncd: can be disabled and replaced with your NTP daemon of choice
systemd-networkd: can be disabled and replaced with your own networking scripts
Modularity would be to be able to use, say, systemd-logind or systemd-udev without using systemd as your init, as there is no tangible or important dependency on the use of systemd as init for those functions.
On a fully-systemd system you can opt out of systemd features. But you cannot opt in to systemd features on a non-systemd system.
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I am telling you that it is difficult to use systemd subcomponents without running all of systemd, and you give me example of running most of systemd and replacing a few subcomponents.
Can you run those 3 standalone?
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Your last paragraph is why most of the people who don't like systemd don't like it.
People who don't like it can call me back when they graduate beyond ricing their i3 desktop and run a ~5k node server fleet, and then tell me how they did it without reimplementing everything systemd already does.
> run a ~5k node server fleet,
That is why RedHat wants it. What does it help on the laptop that I am writing this?
And what happens when you upgrade that fleet (unless you're doing clean installs) and sytemd-resolved is not resolving anything? (Just the most recent thing I've had)
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I'm very curious about specifically what is it that it does for you that is so amazing, besides init that you can't live without?