Re: [arch-general] When will Arch switch to Systemd

21 Jan 2011

      C Anthony Risinger (2011-01-20 11:45):
...
i shot of a couple emails to drum up some comments regarding this
proposal.  to recap, here are some observations/pros/cons, feel free
to add/remove/review/dispute because try as i might, i'm biased; let
me be the first to say it :-)
sysvinit [ PROS ]
) familiarity
) zero dependencies
) already works
) bash (is this even a pro?)
) ... i'm having a hard time here ....
sysvinit [ CONS ]
) provides no information about boot
) relies on mountains of external bash scripts
) zero reliability or control over process once they start
) no real functionality at all tbh (is this biased? ... no :-)
systemd [PROS]
) lightweight dependencies (DBUS)
) internal/fast handling of menial startup/teardown duties
) handling of complexities like RAID and LVM consistently? (verify?)
) will soon (or already) unify automatic process launch in general (cron/etc)
) verifiable boot (systemadm)
) introspective via DBUS
) accurate and precise kill/reload/restart (first time ever on linux!)
) resource limiting and monitoring of whole process groups! (via the
cgroups, another first!)
) service rules for how to handle OOM and other nasties
) socket/bus/FS activation (implicit dependencies)
) boot tracing/stepping (interactive boot, once service at a time)
) significant peerstream (fedora/etc) support and force behind the project
) very complete Arch integrations! yay!
sysvinit [ CONS ]
) non-zero dependencies
) newer, less production experience
) some missing unit/service files (which?)
) rc.conf either needs to go, or we find a way to update systemd when
it changes...
systemd requires newest releases of Linux kernel, dbus, udev and
util-linux-ng. An optional GUI (the systemadm you mentioned) even requires
GTK-3. Hopefully this will not be a problem by the time it gets stable.
Otherwise you will have to forget about servers.

One more CON: systemd uses ~25 small binaries instead of a couple of shell
scripts like /etc/rc.sysinit. The source of these binaries is lacking
comments. Consequently, you have to be very good with C to improve
anything. Read: the boot process becomes opaque. Enterprise scale
administration becomes easier at the cost of system simplicity. There can
be no KISS in an environment running systemd, dbus, policykit etc.

-- 
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