On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 7:35 AM, Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no> wrote:
Felipe,
On Aug 15, 2012 3:35 AM, "Felipe Contreras" <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
I tried systemd a while ago in a brand new machine with Arch Linux and the boot was *much slower*. After some exchanges with Lennart Poettering and other people in Google+[1], it became clear I was on my own. Eventually I found the culprit: Fedora uses CONFIG_HZ_1000, and Arch Linux uses CONFIG_HZ_300. It became clear to me that systemd was not ready for prime time, it wasn't thoroughly tested in a lot of machines, and if you have problems Lennart Poettering will blame you (PulseAudio sounds familiar?).
Do you have a link to a proper bug report for this issue? I tried reading the Google+ thread but I couldn't stomach how rude you were in each of your messages (including the first one) so stopped reading.
No, I don't have such report.
systemd was the reason I stopped using Fedora in the first place; when they moved to it my machine stopped booting reliably. My configuration was non-standard (a single encrypted partition), so I guess they never tested that. Similarly, I expect many Arch Linux users to bite these corner-cases.
Please note that we have waited much longer than Fedora did to make sure the corner cases have been taken care of. Is this problem still an issue, or is it just FUD? Link to (current) bug report?
I don't have that machine available at the moment, but I don't see how such an issue could have been fixed given the lack of interest from Lennart in that G+ post. I'd say this issue most likely is not fixed, but it's only an example. Just like one this there might be more.
Finally, it's much harder to debug. If you have a problem you will not be able to open a script and figure out what is happening, and perhaps modify it, and debug it. You would be greeted with an unmodified binary, and the source code would be along these lines:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/src/remount-fs/remount-fs.c
As someone who has spent a lot of time debugging both, I much prefer systemd. I think you are being disingenuous here, surely you don't have a problem reading C?
And I prefer sh. Preferences don't count for much. I do read and write C everyday for probably for more than 10 years now, yet I do have trouble reading systemd's code, but that's not important, what is important is that in order to test my modifications (to add debugging for example), I would need to *recompile*.
I'm sure in due time systemd will be ready, and will have nice advantages, but I doubt that's the case right now. Has anybody looked into the CONFIG_HZ issue? I doubt that.
This is the first I hear of it. I'd be interested to follow up if there is a proper bug report without unnecessary hostility.
Not to my knowledge.
I was expecting more from the Arch Linux community, something along the lines of Google's analysis to pick to mercurial[2], but so far I have only seen a couple of people saying +1 in the development mailing list, with barely any explanation at all. Such an important move (one that might make users' machines stop booting) should warrant at least an analysis of some sort, with clear advantages. Would it not?
We provided systemd optionally for a long time, as you know. Its pros and cons have been discussed at the various making lists at great length. A significant portion of our userbase has switched to it, and no serious issues seem to remain, based on the feedback we have been getting. Each dev will have had the possibility of trying it, and researching it. They will have done their own analysis on which the +1s are based. I see no value in providing an official public analysis. That's not how we work, and it would not help in the decision making at this point.
Well, I see absolutely no evidence of such an analysis, so consider me a skeptic.
That's not to say that an analysis would not be an interesting read, and I'm sure people like Allan our Jason will provide some excellent blog posts about this at some point.
One can only hope. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras