this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)

Linux

47996 readers
1030 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

SystemD is blamed for long boot times and being heavy and bloated on resources. I tried OpenRC and Runit on real hardware (Ryzen 5000-series laptop) for week each and saw only 1 second faster boot time.

I'm old enough to remember plymouth.service (graphical image) being the most slowest service on boot in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. But I don't see that as an issue anymore. I don't have a graphical systemD boot on my Arch but I installed Fedora Sericea and it actually boots faster than my Arch despite the plymouth (or whatever they call it nowadays).

My 2 questions:

  1. Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they've improved a lot)?
  2. Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Nah, it's fine. Boot times are considerably faster than sys.v in most cases, and it has a huge amount of functionality. Most people I work with have adopted it and much prefer it to the old init.d and sys.v systems.

People's problem with systemd (and there are fewer people strongly against it than before) seem to break down into two groups:

  1. They were happy with sys.v and didn't like change. Some were unhappy with how distros adopted it. (The debian wars in particular were really quite vicious)

  2. It does too much. systemd is modular, but even so does break one of the core linux tenets - "do one thing well". Despite the modularity, it's easy to see it as monolithic.

But regardless of feelings, systemd has achieved what it set out to do and is the defacto choice for the vast majority of distros, and they adopted it because it's better. Nobody really cares if a user tries to make a point by not using it any more, they're just isolating themselves. The battle was fought and systemd won it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

"do one thing well"

Arguably, Systemd does exactly that: orchestrate the parallel starting of services, and do it well.

The problem with init.d and sys.v is they were not designed for multi-core systems where multiple services can start at once, and had no concept of which service depended on which, other than a lineal "this before that". Over the years, they got extended with very dirty hacks and tons of support functions that were not consistent between distributions, and still barely functional.

Systemd cleaned all of that up, added parallel starting taking into account service dependencies, which meant adding an enhanced journaling system to pull status responses from multiple services at once, same for pulling device updates, and security and isolation configs.

It's really the minimum that can be done (well) for a parallel start system.

load more comments (2 replies)