SystemD on Debian

[Anthony de Boer]

William Muriithi wrote:
> > This is definitely an area that warrants a talk, with something of a
> round-table, so we can share experiences, as systemd is a daemon launcher
> that's clearly gotten the critical mass that it'll be used on most Linux
> distributions forthcoming.
> >
> 
> No doubt, look like there is no avoiding it.  Petty much all the big
> distributions are on it and it is just a matter of time and will be history.
> 
> Now, what happen to BSD? Are they likely to follow along too? I remember a
> lot of people didn't want anything to do with it - came up when discussing
> udev if i remember correctly - and even Windows developers make fun of it,
> but it has overcome all that resistance.

The sticky bit there is that systemd uses cgroup support from the Linux
kernel to help differentiate processes that belong to each daemon it
started.  Whether it would be hard or difficult to implement the same or
equivalent in a BSD kernel, or whether it offends the aesthetic sense of
their kernel developers to even go there, would be an issue.

Looking a bit deeper, it also wants inotify (another Linux-specific API)
and a few other specific kernel config flags.

With my old Unix hat on, I'm remembering too many times that vendors
would come out with some proprietary feature that would only work on
their boxes, and it would fragment the community as some would climb on
that bandwagon and others would stick with the common denominator that
all the boxes they had to support had.  I know the label "PROPRIETARY"
isn't supposed to stick to Linux, but these features are working that
way.

Bottom line is that evolution is going to happen to BSD, one way or
other.

The old SysV (and V7 before that) ways of starting all the daemons
certainly weren't perfect; we've had a number of initiatives toward
doing something better, and one of them has finally gained a critical
mass.  Time to move forward and see how it works.

-- 
Anthony de Boer
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