[arch-general] Think twice before moving to systemd

[Brandon Watkins]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 9:35 PM, Felipe Contreras <
felipe.contreras at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I just became aware that Arch Linux plans to switch to systemd, and
> this worries me for several reasons.
>
> 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?).
>
> 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.
>
> 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
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> At the moment I am unconvinced; does systemd has any *real* advantage?
> I don't think so; the potential of breakage outweighs the "supposed"
> advantages, and I think a proper analysis would show that.
>
> Cheers.
>
> [1] https://plus.google.com/108736516888538655285/posts/BTG39o6YoGS
> [2] http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis
>
> --
> Felipe Contreras
>
I haven't had this issue at all, and so far the systemd developers have
been very accommodating to the arch developers