irqbalance and at daemons by default?

[Clint Byrum]

Excerpts from Daniel J Blueman's message of 2013-03-26 09:02:19 -0700:
> On 26 March 2013 21:55, Chow Loong Jin <hyperair at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > On 26/03/2013 18:38, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
> >> When setting up Ubuntu servers and desktops, two daemons I always
> >> remove are the atd and irqbalance.
> >>
> >> irqbalance is perhaps good when you have a server with quad-port NIC
> >> with a high rate of small packets and have found it to benefit over
> >> the kernel's interrupt allocation (but wastes time and energy
> >> otherwise); finally, the demographic who know and use the at daemon
> >> must be >1% surely.
> >>
> >> What justification do we have for continuing forcing these on users by
> >> default? (and can we win back some a slightly leaner, securer setup by
> >> revisiting this logic?)
> >
> > I'm not sure you win much back:
> >  - apt-cache show at | sed -n 's/^Size: //p' => 37376
> >  - ps -C atd -o cputime,etime => 00:00:00 8-03:30:27
> >  - ps -C atd -o rss => 68
> >
> > So all in all, 37.4k of disk space, 68k of memory, and approximately 0 seconds
> > of CPU time out of 8d 3h.
> >
> > Are there many security vulnerabilities in atd?
> 
> The same can be said for irqbalance, except it does clock up cputime:
> 
> $ ps -C irqbalance -o cputime,etime => 00:40:55 82-02:24:34
> ...which is 30s/day on a single-user workstation
> 
> $ ps -C irqbalance -o rss => 392kb
> 
> But this is all missing a core tenet of Debian/Ubuntu: you select what
> you want running and aren't imposed upon.
> 

This is hardly imposing.

We run a number of things for convenience, not because they are hard
requirements. Ubuntu, even Ubuntu server, is still focused on being
simple to use, not 100% technically pure. Part of that is including
utilities that have a number of use cases.

> DL> at has reverse dependency lsb-core, that is if we care to support
> DL> lsb-core set out of the box.
> 
> Out the box, lsb-base is installed; lsb-core isn't, so that doesn't
> change anything (you'd still need to install lsb-core which would pull
> in atd).
> 
> If we have no solid technical reasoning for imposing these daemons by
> default, I'll propose we don't.

irqbalance is one of those things that makes things a ton better when
it is needed, and is nearly free when it is not. -1 on removing it.

atd is highly useful when you want it, and I have seen people re-implement
it in perl/php/python/etc. without realizing that simply doing

echo /run/my/thing | at now + 5 minutes

Would solve their problem.

That said, its got the worst command name *EVER* for googling. So I don't
know that its uptake will increase much beyond now. Still.. as has been
noted.. the footprint is not exactly massive.