No systemd discussion?

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Jamon Camisso <jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>
wrote:

> On 2014-08-11 2:36 PM, Peter wrote:
> > So systemd is causing a lot of grief and panic among seasoned users of
> > slackware bare metal init systems, and system V init users. And there is
> no
> > discussion on this on tolug? Okay, I tossed the hot potato into the ring.
> > Feelings about systemd and the required adaptation (and, no doubt,
> teething
> > troubles)? I am an older guy who cut his Linux teeth in ~1995 with
> Slackware
> > installed from many floppies and later cds, so I know where I am
> standing.
> > Was it worth the extra trouble to make a daemon do what scripts did fine
> for
> > 40 years?
>
> Scripts aren't portable compared to a distribution agnostic tool like
> systemd. You don't have different places to go looking for rc*
> directories and files. You don't have to deal with those rc files'
> strange distribution specific sed and awk invocations.
>
> Moreover, it allows for dependency based service start up within a
> cgroup control system - when something crashes you can handle it more
> easily than with detached zombie pid files and the like of normal
> fork/double-forked processes.
>
> I'm using it and quite like it. My $0.02.
>

I'm suspicious that it was contributing to my XBMC box rebooting
spontaneously.  I upgraded Debian which drew in SystemD, and found that the
box, at first, would reboot if I left XBMC alone long enough (roughly) for
the screensaver to kick in.  Later (which led to my getting a new box
http://linuxdatabases.info/info/steele.html) it got to the point where I
could barely get XBMC running before it would reboot.   The box (one of the
last IBM desktops before they went to Lenovo) was pretty ancient, so I
didn't feel badly about upgrading to new hardware with lots more GB of RAM,
HDMI output, and such.

It is, strictly speaking, "superstition" to think that it was specifically
SystemD causing the problem.  The upgrade coincided with things getting
somewhat worse, however it's not evident that there were software or config
changes coinciding with things getting further worse.  The other suspicious
thing would be heat-related; lm-sensors warned me that one of the fans was
dead.  Conceivably, there's something about X getting real busy that might
make heat spike and make the machine decide to shut down.  I couldn't see
anything in logs indicating adverse things happen at the time of the
failure.  Of course, if the log writes got throttled by the system falling
over, well, quel surpris?

One sorta favorable systemd thing I have noticed is that on Debian, they
have set things up so that /etc/init.d scripts become pointers to the
systemd commands, thus...
 /etc/init.d/bind9 restart
  invokes
 service bind9 restart

so that us "legacy users" aren't totally bereft of guidance of what's going
on.  If my fingers still think that's how to restart BIND, that's OK...

I seem to recall that Drew was going to do something on SystemD (possibly
in September); it's probably not a bad idea to throw some questions his way
so that if there are things that people are particularly keen on
understanding, he might know about it.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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