irqbalance and at daemons by default?

[Steve Langasek]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 12:02:19AM +0800, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
> 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

There is a cost to running irqbalance, yes.  But if you're seeing any load
from it, that implies that you do have multiple cores, and irqbalance is
doing something *useful* with that CPU time.

> $ 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.

That's not a core tenet in Ubuntu. :)  The core tenet for Ubuntu is that we
make opinionated decisions to ensure Ubuntu works out of the box for users.

> 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.

The historical rationale for atd being included by default is "this is a
standard part of Unix that users expect to find there" (a rationale that
was, in effect, inherited from Debian).  However, of all the services that
we run by default, this is by far the most arcane; "1%" of our users is
severely overstating how much atd gets used, and unlike cron, nothing that's
installed by default relies on it.  And this is definitely the service that
most often has questions raised about its presence... and several Canonical
OEM projects have definitely removed it from their installs in the interest
of reducing footprint, which is going to be a recurring theme on the phone
stack.

So I would say that the time has probably come for us to remove atd from the
default Ubuntu system.  Other opinions?

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20130326/b0f090d9/attachment.pgp>