Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]

Wed Oct 22 21:48:28 UTC 2014

Bah, boot speed;

On my server, boot is slow down by hardware initialization.
The soft side is quite low.

But the point is not "makes things faster from 15 to 14 sec is useless".
The point is : it's good, but at what price ?

As you said, there were many improvements over the past.
What was the "clean bit" cost ? None but benefits, right ?
What about fs logs ? Does it have a cost ?

If systemd is just about time, it will be fine.
But why trying to recreate (ans thus, squeeze) some old daemons like
cron or syslog ? Both of them are doing a perfect job.

Can I use systemd without any of journald stuff ?
If not, then the 1sec speedup is far too expensive.

On 22/10/2014 20:31, Barry Shein wrote:
> 
> On October 21, 2014 at 16:43 morrowc.lists at gmail.com (Christopher Morrow) wrote:
>  > On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Andrew Sullivan <asullivan at dyn.com> wrote:
>  > > On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 03:11:55PM -0400, Barry Shein wrote:
>  > >> But
>  > >> for example some of my servers boot in seconds.
>  > >
>  > > One is reminded of a mail, included in the Preface to _The UNIX-HATERS
>  > > Handbook_, available at
>  > 
>  > it's really not clear to me that 'reboots in seconds' is a thing to optimize...
> 
> The unix community has exerted great amounts of effort over the
> decades to speed up reboot, particularly after crashes but also
> planned. Perhaps you don't remember the days when an fsck was
> basically mandatory and could take 15-20 minutes on a large disk.
> 
> Then we added the clean bit (disk unmounted cleanly, no need for
> fsck), reorg'd the file system layout to speed up fsck considerably
> and make it more reliable/recoverable, added journaled file systems
> which really sped things up often eliminating the need to fsck after a
> crash entirely and recovering in seconds, various attempts to figure
> out the dependency graph of servers and services which need to be
> started so they could be started in parallel where dependencies are
> met, etc.
> 
> And learned how to do hot failover and master/slave servers etc.
> 
> And you whisk all that away with "it's not really clear to me that
> 'reboots in seconds' is a think to be optimized"????
> 
> To me that's like saying it's not important to try to design so one
> can recover from a network outage in seconds.
> 
> Anyhow, if it's not clear: I disagree.
> 
>  > 
>  > I suppose the win is:
>  >   "Is the startup/shutdown process clear, conscise and understandable
>  > at 3am local time?"
>  > 
>  > followed by:
>  >   "Can I adjust my startup processes to meet my needs easily and
>  > without finding a phd in unix?"
>  > 
>  > If systemd is simply a change in how I think about /etc/init.d/* and
>  > /etc/rc?.d/* cool, if it's more complexity and less EASY flexibility
>  > then it's a fail.
> 
> Actually, much of that is less important except perhaps to a hobbyist.
> 
> You only have to get the startup/shutdown process etc right once in a
> while and generally during a planned outage.
> 
> Recovering from a failure or going back into service quickly after a
> planned outage is critical and can be critical at any time.
> 
> Obviously one can appeal to extremum but what you say doesn't make
> sense to me. At any rate, you are disputing a huge, decades long, and
> widely fought battle. It's certainly not my opinion.
> 
> 