systemd, beyond init

by Lennart Poettering

systemd is a system and session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic.

Wow, what a paragraph! In case I lost you half-way: in our presentation I hope to explain in a lot more detail what systemd is really about, and parse with you the paragraph in a way that is hopefully more understandable.

Both the Fedora and OpenSUSE distributions (and many others, too) are working on making systemd the default init system in their next releases. Since the init system is a core part of the operating system and systemd a major change that will impact what we consider a Linux system quite a bit this talk should be interesting to all developers, administrators and users alike.

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Development European Meeting) is a European event centered around Free and Open Source software development. It is aimed at developers and all interested in the Free and Open Source news in the world. Its goals are to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open source software. More info at http://fosdem.org

• Category

  Education

[bamdadkhan]

here's hoping it comes out better than pulseaudio. :) (sorry, couldn't resist)

[MadCatMk254]

"..so as the process goes away, the init system still retains the original socket; and if the init system then notices: 'OH MY GOD SYSLOG CRASHED'" cracked me up.

Great presentation.

[Garegin]

i have low hopes for pulseaudio. linux is only supported by major corporations in the enterprise. they don't give a flying eff about sound mixing on a database cluster.

[WorBlux]

ZFS actually does/can run as a linux kernel module, the reason you don't see it in distros is licencing incompatibilities..

LXC to me looks like it could meet or exceed jails once it's matured It's a similar technology, allowing namespace isolation of a group of processes. Better for resource management (cgroup based) worse for security (no superuser privilege separation)

Each focuses on a different thing and are better at different things

RE: pf vs iptables, it's all greak to me

[shaurz]

This is a very clever idea, I'm impressed. I'm going to install systemd on my Arch Linux system and see how well it works.

[Milos Gajdos]

I'd be curious about how does udev come in play with regards to systemd

[Pawlerson]

kfreebsd doesn't even run on mobile, because it's too heavy compared to Linux kernel. It's Linux that supports KMS, G3D and so on. Like I said when you replace Linux for something else you'll loose features and performance.

[Pawlerson]

Maybe jail is better in some cases, but when comes to virtualization jail looses badly. However, zfs and jail is nothing compared to Linux advantages, don't you think? :)

It's Linux, GNU and FLOSS overall that made things great. Bsd and solaris existed long before Linux, but they did nothing for FLOSS. kfreebsd is old and ugly kernel that contains 25+ years old code. You can sometimes change Linux kernel for kfreebsd, but you'll loose many superior things.