[arch-general] When will Arch switch to Systemd

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 7:11 AM, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have been working on integration of Arch and Systemd.
>
> At the moment I think the support is complete, and for me it has been
> 100% stable for some time. That said, much more widespread testing is
> required before it can really be said to be stable (so any testing and
> bug reporting would be highly appreciated, especially if you use
> lvm/raid/encryption).

bingo.  this is the response i was looking for :-)

> We would also like to improve the documentation, so if anyone has any
> questions that are not answered by the wiki page, please let me know.
>
> Regarding people who are worried about getting an unbootable system:
> systemd and sysvinit can (and should) be installed in parallel, so you
> can switch between them by adding "init=/bin/systemd" to your kernel
> line in GRUB (so if it does break your boot, you can just reboot back
> into sysvinit).
>
> Any questions can be posed on this mailinglist, on the systemd thread
> in the forum or in #archlinux or #systemd on IRC, where myself
> ("tomegun") and "falconindy" can sometimes be found.

that is excellent information and an encouragement to try it out;
likely this weekend if it indeed works that well :-D

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...

C Anthony