systemd for 11.10 ?

[James Hunt]

Hi Phillip,

On 10/05/11 18:39, Phillip Susi wrote:
> On 5/10/2011 6:46 AM, Steffen Barszus wrote:
>> So the discussion should be on how to evaluate systemd , and set a
>> number of criterias to benchmark both. Then the better one should be
>> planned for slow migration.
>>
>> "Look its new and it has bells and whistles lets move to that" is not
>> a valid argument for moving to a new init.
> 
> I agree, so let's see if we can get the ball rolling in that direction.
> 
> Some of the shortcomings I see with upstart that systemd sounds like it
> addresses are:
> 
> 1)  The ability to drop back to single user mode for system
> administration.  Upstart can not make sure that all processes started
> during multi user mode that are not supposed to be running in single
> user mode are actually killed.
If you are seeing strange behaviour, please raise bugs so we can look at
them.

> 
> 2)  The ability to serialize state and re-execute itself so it can run
> in the initramfs and then hand off to the real system.
This is being considerd. I wasn't aware that systemd could run in
initramfs. Regardless, I believe that Fedora is moving to dracut for
initramfs. Whereas Ubuntu is planning to put Upstart into the initramfs
for Oneiric.

> 
> 3)  The ability to figure out why a given service runs or does not run
> when it does or should.  Right now Upstart relies on comments being
> added to the config files to give the admin clues about this, but that
> is inherently unreliable and still difficult to figure out.

See:


http://upstart.at/2011/03/25/visualisation-of-jobs-and-events-in-ubuntu-natty/

Tomorrow, here at UDS we will be discussing the provision of new tooling
for administrators that would give a more "traditional" view of services:

 https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/foundations-o-upstart-for-admins

> 
> 4)  The increased parallelism systemd offers by running services at the
> same time as those they "depend" on by having systemd create the socket
> is not something upstart currently can do.  I am not sure if it can be
> extended to do this or not.
> 

Systemd offers no increased parallelism over Upstart for starting and
managing jobs that I'm aware of. Note that Upstart was designed from the
ground up for performance and parallelism.

As of natty, Upstart has a socket bridge which is very similar to
systemd's "socket activation" facility. Note that both products' socket
features are probably going to be most effective for server-type apps
though.

Regards,

James.