# Will FreeBSD ever use the Linux systemd management framework?



## Maelstorm (Dec 29, 2017)

Not sure if this should go here or in the off-topic forum.

I've been doing some research into systemd and the controversy behind it.  Here's the background as I understand it...

From what I can ascertain, two developers from Red Hat (who shall remain nameless) started this project to replace init, to make system startup faster and more efficient.  The project consists of multiple programs which are tightly coupled together and use specialized Linux system calls to the kernel.

Some pros to using systemd:

Faster startup.
Daemons start in parallel and not serial like in init.
Active monitoring of daemons.  Will attempt to restart a daemon that exits.
Single config file in one location instead of multiple obscure files in different places (supposedly).
Not as fragile as init is (also supposedly).
Some cons as I see them:

It's taking over more and more functions that was previously served by other tools.
It is violating the Unix philosophy of having one tool to do one job very well.
Overly complex (looks like svchost.exe from Windows).
Popular software now has hard dependencies (Gnome 3.8 and later).
The attitude of the developers (Linus Torvalds banned one of them).
Sponsored by Red Hat, who is forcing down the Linux community's throat.
In looking at the pros, embedded applications would benefit greatly from systemd.  But for workstations and big iron, not so much.  A number of the big distros have switched to systemd because of software dependencies.  RHEL, Fedora, SUSe, Gentoo, Unbuntu, Arch, and others.

This leads to a few questions....

I looked in ports, and I see that Gnome 3.18 is available.  Since systemd is a Linux only monster, and that Gnome 3.8 and later has systemd marked as a hard dependency, how does Gnome run on FreeBSD?

Will FreeBSD ever have a systemd equivalent? The current init system seems to work just fine.  At least from what I have seen.  I haven't had any problems with it.


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## Snurg (Dec 29, 2017)

OMG! 
I hope this monster will never get hold of BSD.

Regarding Gnome, I guess then some shim will need to be made for BSD users, for those who love that DE.


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## sidetone (Dec 29, 2017)

Never fear, based on most public reactions of FreeBSD users, they object to that tangling of components.
We should allow a GNU fork of the ports tree to do whatever it is, they want to do. And, more importantly make functional rules for ports here, based on KISS (Keep it Simple ...)
Typical FreeBSD users need to move on to smaller window managers, instead of Gnome, KDE, XFCE.
It kind of defeats the purpose to have Gnome on top of FreeBSD.
(I think this is more of off-topic)


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## Beastie7 (Dec 29, 2017)

No

/thread


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## Maelstorm (Dec 29, 2017)

I interact with my system via CLI only.  pdksh is my shell of choice, although I do have bash installed.  I have a 3dfx card installed in the machine, so it shouldn't be that hard to install X on it.  As for window managers, I always prefered olwm from Solaris.


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## vermaden (Dec 29, 2017)

Maelstorm said:


> From what I can ascertain, two developers from Red Hat (who shall remain nameless) started this project to replace init, to make system startup faster and more efficient.



Lennart Poettering is responsible for writing this shit, same with Avahi and PulseAudio.



Maelstorm said:


> The project consists of multiple programs which are tightly coupled together and use specialized Linux system calls to the kernel.


Do You really believe that systemd is engineered or is it just like that:








Maelstorm said:


> Faster startup.


Look at FreeBSD boot and check how much time is taken by LOADER, then by KERNEL and then by RC init. RC only takes about 1/4 of that time and I havent seen that it is aignifically faster then systemd on Centos 7.4 for example.



Maelstorm said:


> Daemons start in parallel and not serial like in init.


Yes, they run everything in parallel withtout chaecking ANY dependencies, fail most services, then restart them again at again at the boot process to eventually finally have everything started. This seem to be intelligent approach? not much. Also with RC, or OpenRC or RUNIT the boot process is DETERMINISTIC which is VERY important in operating systems. With systemd its random and You can not even reproduce its bugs sometimes because boot process is different every fscking time ...



Maelstorm said:


> Active monitoring of daemons.  Will attempt to restart a daemon that exits.


This can be achieved with *daemontools* but I agree that having that in RC would be good.



Maelstorm said:


> Single config file in one location instead of multiple obscure files in different places (supposedly).


FreeBSD RC also has one config file in one location - /etc/rc.conf



Maelstorm said:


> Not as fragile as init is (also supposedly).


Excuse me? Are we talking about same piece of shit 'software' systemd here? RC init is rock stable while systemd breaks everything and itself ... it has been also nominated and rewarded (multiple times) as being worst piece of software and also with biggest and most dangerous security holes.




Maelstorm said:


> Sponsored by Red Hat, who is forcing down the Linux community's throat.


Systemd situation in the Linux ecosystem is quite like gang rape. Statistically most participants of a gang rape are happy :ASD




Maelstorm said:


> In looking at the pros, embedded applications would benefit greatly from systemd.


In what way?




Maelstorm said:


> But for workstations and big iron, not so much.  A number of the big distros have switched to systemd because of software dependencies.  RHEL, Fedora, SUSe, Gentoo, Unbuntu, Arch, and others.


RHEL CREATED systemd, so its 'ironic' saying that is *SWITCHED* to systemd ... same thing with Fedora which is also Red Hat 'playground'.
SUSE is just for the money, they do what Red Hat do and vice versa.

Gentoo has MANY init systems, systemd is just one of them and its NOT the default.

Ubuntu just goes with the upstream, its 'cheaper' for them to not maintain their own 'upstart'.

Arch is just bleeding edge, no matter the consequences ...

Look at Debian and Devuan (fork), the Debian community has been cut to two halves ...

There is little to none hope in Linux ecosystem because of systemd, but Alpine Linux and Gentoo/Devuan are the last ones that are SENSIBLE choices.




Maelstorm said:


> I looked in ports, and I see that Gnome 3.18 is available.  Since systemd is a Linux only monster, and that Gnome 3.8 and later has systemd marked as a hard dependency, how does Gnome run on FreeBSD?


Good, that systemd sh!t is definitely not needed, OpenBSD created 'dummy' systemd replacements which 'emulate' this sh!t behavior just to MEET thos sick dependencies, this is the best way as OpenBSD CONTROL this code.




Maelstorm said:


> Will FreeBSD ever have a systemd equivalent? The current init system seems to work just fine.  At least from what I have seen.  I haven't had any problems with it.


Maybe, definitely not systemd. Rather not launchd from Darwin/MacOSX/macOS.

An incremental update with 'daemontools' monitoring would be useful.

Regards.


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## sidetone (Dec 29, 2017)

Maelstorm just created a &@#!storm in here. vermaden just let it out. Anyone familiar with these forums would know the reaction to this topic.



vermaden said:


> FreeBSD RC also has one config file in one location - /etc/rc.conf


 Sort of. For customized configurations, there's also /etc/rc.conf.local or /usr/local/etc/rc.conf. There's also the defaults to be overridden at /etc/defaults/rc.conf. Still, this is very simple.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 29, 2017)

Maelstorm said:


> Overly complex (looks like svchost.exe from Windows).



This is how spyware hides itself on Windows.  Similarly launchd enables spyware such as MacKeeper on macOS.


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## Snurg (Dec 29, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> This is how spyware hides itself on Windows. Similarly launchd enables spyware


I won't be surprised if some day it will become illegal to run systemd-less unixoids in Germany and China.


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## Maelstorm (Dec 29, 2017)

Thanks for the education.  No, really.  I did read that it was replacing some of the old tried and true functionality that was covered by other services (cron, inetd, etc...), but I had no clue it was that bad.  I'm glad that it won't be finding its way into the *BSDs for some time to come.  The big thing that I saw was the attitude of the systemd developers.  Linus Torvalds himself banned one of them because of their bad attitudes to the community.  So it looks like it's a project that is propped up by inflated egos.

I was reading about PulseAudio...  "Since we are using more functions of the drivers that haven't been used before, we expose more bugs in the drivers.  Nope, not our fault.  If you think it's our fault, then you fix our code..."  I wasn't aware that the developers behind systemd was also behind PulseAudio.  Now it makes sense.

This actually reflects a trend that I see in software development as of late.  It seems that the new generation of coders want to change things for the sake of change, whether good or bad.  This is one of the main reasons why I avoid Linux.  Sometimes, one needs a few years to understand the wisdom behind the adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" which I think applies here.


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## Maelstorm (Dec 29, 2017)

Snurg said:


> I won't be surprised if some day it will become illegal to run systemd-less unixoids in Germany and China.



Well, it *IS* open source, so one could remove the spyware if they were so inclined.  But a better solution is to not install it at all.


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## MarcoB (Dec 29, 2017)

Don't think it will ever be on FreeBSD, but porting DE's like Gnome will eventually be impossible. I'm afraid that big applications like Firefox or Chromium will depend on systemd too.


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## vermaden (Dec 29, 2017)

Maelstorm said:


> This actually reflects a trend that I see in software development as of late.  It seems that the new generation of coders want to change things for the sake of change, whether good or bad.  This is one of the main reasons why I avoid Linux.  Sometimes, one needs a few years to understand the wisdom behind the adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" which I think applies here.


It is a 'rule' in Linux world for quite some time, ifconfig is deprecated, us ip, netstat is deprecated, use ss, route is deprecated, use ip, arp is deprecated, use ip, yum is deprecated, use dnf (but still uses RPM under the hood :ASD), iwconfig is deprecated, use iw ... its endless. Linux 'ecosystem' LOVES to rewrite everything introducing the same (or different) bugs over and over again in the pretext of 'improvement'. Its quite the opposite what is happening in the BSD where tools are IMPROVED. Take a look at OpenBSD's ifconfig which is now also used instead of wpa_supplicant ... just one example of many.

Take a look at this 'mess' mapping:
https://teknixx.com/new-linux-networking-commands/


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## Deleted member 9563 (Dec 29, 2017)

Maelstorm said:


> Faster startup.



That's for laptops. Nobody else needs it.

Well there is actually one other use case. That is where your computer is hooked up to the light in the bathroom and keeps restarting.


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## Maxnix (Dec 29, 2017)

vermaden said:


> Its quite the opposite what is happening in the BSD where tools are IMPROVED. Take a look at OpenBSD's ifconfig which is now also used instead of wpa_supplicant ... just one example of many.


I'd like to see such integration on FreeBSD too.


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## SirDice (Dec 29, 2017)

vermaden said:


> An incremental update with 'daemontools' monitoring would be useful.


I quite like sysutils/fsc as it integrates really well with the existing FreeBSD boot scripts. I'd like to see something like that integrated in the base.


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## ShelLuser (Dec 29, 2017)

Personally I think the current rc system works quite well. If they would want to have some replacement or 'improvement' then I think the manifest boot process from Solaris 10 (I don't remember the official name anymore) would be a much better alternative. Of course that won't really work because of the different boot process (rc.conf vs. init.d), but at least it could be less intrusive. Assuming that you could somehow apply it to the rc process of course.

But I'm quite confident that a monstrosity such as systemd will never get its tentacles into FreeBSD.


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## vermaden (Dec 29, 2017)

SirDice said:


> I quite like sysutils/fsc as it integrates really well with the existing FreeBSD boot scripts. I'd like to see something like that integrated in the base.


Thanks for sharing this *fsc* I love such simple tools that provide that much simple yet useful features with that small amount of work and code.

Any idea how to change the timeout for the service restart?


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## vermaden (Dec 29, 2017)

ShelLuser said:


> Personally I think the current rc system works quite well. If they would want to have some replacement or 'improvement' then I think the manifest boot process from Solaris 10 (I don't remember the official name anymore) would be a much better alternative.



Its SMF and svcs/svcadm as commands. As tool its great, but configuration in XML is not that like'able. I would like to see a RC / SMFmerge with some usable config format, at least JSON ...


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## vermaden (Dec 29, 2017)

OJ said:


> That's for laptops. Nobody else needs it.



This idiot (Lennart) literally wrote systemd for his laptop which he claims in one of the interviews, along with claiming that he has ZERO knowledge about maintaining servers ... and this guy wrotes init system for the most widely used system (Linux) for servers on Earth ... and Red Hat thinks this is 'innovation' ...

Interview:


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## Maxnix (Dec 29, 2017)

Lennart Poettering said:
			
		

> I need to think ahead and not backwards.


About thinking maybe his right , but about going...


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## Handsome Jack (Dec 29, 2017)

OJ said:


> That's for laptops. Nobody else needs it.



Or, if You have Multiboot system with heritage of 100+ Steam games ..


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## Maelstorm (Dec 29, 2017)

OJ said:


> That's for laptops. Nobody else needs it.
> 
> Well there is actually one other use case. That is where your computer is hooked up to the light in the bathroom and keeps restarting.



Oh, that could get messy... 

But seriously, I was thinking more along the lines of embedded applications such as a CCTV recorder or a set-top box where a fast reboot would be advantageous.  Here's a case in point:

A Comcast home gateway for Triple-Play (Phone, Television, Internet) takes 70-90 minutes to fully recover from a reboot.  During that time, things do not work.  The same applies to the set-top boxes as well.  They have to download their software from Comcast's servers.

A home gateway from AT&T for U-verse is about 5 minutes...  Same thing with the set-top boxes: 5 minutes.


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## xtremae (Dec 29, 2017)

Maelstorm said:


> Oh, that could get messy...
> 
> But seriously, I was thinking more along the lines of embedded applications such as a CCTV recorder or a set-top box where a fast reboot would be advantageous.  Here's a case in point:
> 
> ...



I seriously doubt systemd is relevant to the above example in any way, because (it) isn't really about boot times and (it) isn't really an init. I mean, it can be viewed as an fast booting init, but that's missing the point. Regarding the benefits from fast booting embedded devices, there are equally fast (if not faster) init systems like runit and OpenRC so... why not just use one of those? In fact, both runit and OpenRC are compatible with a multitude of libc implementations, especially the ones that target embedded systems (musl-libc, uclibc, etc), while systemd only targets glibc which - in the embedded world - is avoided like the plague. Based on this presentation [06:50], systemd devs probably don't even accept patches that extend systemd's compatibility with other libcs.

With all the above, there're now trends to avoid the systemd + glibc monoculture in the linux world, with systems like Alpine, Void, Devuan, Gentoo, etc.


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## rigoletto@ (Dec 30, 2017)

I think a more interesting subject would be:

* Will FreeBSD ever use/develop an event-based init daemon?
*
What are the actual advantages of event-based init daemons against the tradicional init system? (other than faster boots)

But, since the current subject is SystemD:


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## Beastie7 (Dec 30, 2017)

Instead of screwing with the current system (which is perfectly fine), why not just create a flexible mechanism where you can change between process initialization types? Sequential vs parallel, etc to suite a specific platform. 

Besides, I'd rather have proper suspend/resume than trying to fix what isn't broken.


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## recluce (Dec 30, 2017)

vermaden said:


> Lennart Poettering is responsible for writing this shit, same with Avahi and PulseAudio.
> 
> 
> RHEL CREATED systemd, so its 'ironic' saying that is *SWITCHED* to systemd ... same thing with Fedora which is also Red Hat 'playground'.
> ...



There is one more choice regarding Linux distros: Artix Linux, which is quite new. It is basically the continuation of Arch without systemd and Manjaro-OpenRC.

As for systemd: no, simply no. It is a non-deterministic monster that will break randomly. And when it breaks, it is often impossible to fix. Add to that the "we don't care about security" attitude of the developers and you end up with something that nobody should use.

All my Linux systems will migrate to FreeBSD or Artix, when support for Ubuntu 14.04LTS ends.


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## malco_2001 (Dec 30, 2017)

Maybe it is just that the smart people who knew things should work did not work hard enough to maintain projects like consolekit.  I think if systemd, or shims worked in FreeBSD it would be less likely someone would go through a ton of extra effort to make Gnome for example work with consolekit if shims make porting easier.  As to why systemd is being so widely adopted right now in Linux I think it is as simple as a lot of little fragmented projects like consolekit stared to become stagnant, and unmaintained.  So other projects like KDE said well now we have no choice we must embrace logind which is more active.  So then in turn the maintainers of distributions said what choice do we have?  This may not be the case at all but it's the only logical conclusion I can come up with.


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## sidetone (Dec 30, 2017)

Do the developers of Systemd have degenerative brain tissue? Do they work for a competing proprietary operating system? They ruin software, do they also make others' lives difficult who comes across them?

Why else would anyone make something so dysfunctional, and claim that it's so great?


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## Maelstorm (Dec 30, 2017)

lebarondemerde said:


> I think a more interesting subject would be:
> 
> * Will FreeBSD ever use/develop an event-based init daemon?
> *
> ...



Oh that brings back memories...not good ones either.  Windows Malfunctioning Exploit was something that Bill Gates fished out of his toilet one morning.  It is by far the worst OS that has ever been inflicted on the tech sector.  Microsoft should have been given 20 to life for releasing that POS.  Any self-respecting hard drive worth its silicon would commit suicide if Windows ME was loaded on it.


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## sidetone (Dec 30, 2017)

Maelstorm said:


> Any self-respecting hard drive worth its silicon would commit suicide if Windows ME was loaded on it.


Then, how would anyone be able to install FreeBSD on it?


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## ronaldlees (Dec 30, 2017)

vermaden said:


> ...
> Gentoo has MANY init systems, systemd is just one of them and its NOT the default.
> ...
> There is little to none hope in Linux ecosystem because of systemd, but Alpine Linux and Gentoo/Devuan are the last ones that are SENSIBLE choices.
> ...



I run Gentoo without systemd on some systems, because like you said, it's not the default.  I consider systemd to have a sort of domino effect.  Yesterday, when I tried to install pulseaudio on my Gentoo powered box, it wanted to install systemd as a dependency!!!  WTH ...

Why did I want to install pulseaudio?  Because Firefox (as of 52.0) wants to use only pulseaudio, and no longer just ALSA by itself.  So, you can see the domino effect (sort of) in the _Firefox -> pulseaudio -> systemd_ lineup.

Pulseaudio does not have a hard dependency on systemd, but it was configured that way in the port because of the mindset that is taking everything over.  It's a slowly creeping entity.  So, today I'm trying to do something similar to the way FreeBSD handles pulseaudio / sndio, on Gentoo.

So, the _monolithic nature_ of systemd can be seen not to stay within its original scope.  Some of this may be due to developers just assuming that it should be used in configurations, but eventually it'll lead to a monolithic structure imposed on much more than what was the original premise ...


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## rigoletto@ (Dec 30, 2017)

ronaldlees 

systemd and pulseaudio (and avahi) come from the same deviant mind. People maintaining those in Linux should all be one of the systemd "promoters".

Btw, I do not have any Gentoo box anymore but Paludis seem to be more interesting (and probably faster) than `emerge`/Portage.


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## ralphbsz (Dec 30, 2017)

While everyone loves to be upset about the Linux development culture (and Lennart is indeed a complete jerk, but that's common in the Linux community), and everyone loves to hate systemd and the horror stories about it, consider these two factoids:

Administering Linux before systemd wasn't trivial either.  The system configuration (both parameters of the kernel and interfaces, and which services to start when and how) was a huge mess beforehand.  Systemd has not removed the mess (it really can't, there are too many moving parts), just arranged it differently.

And while I have not had to do any serious admin work on a Linux machine since systemd has been in use (matter-of-fact, I have done very little admin stuff on Linux in the last 10 years, with the exception of one Raspberry Pi running Raspbian, which does have systemd), I have friends who administer very complex servers (clusters, with high-end networking, extreme hardware, strange and powerful software), and they say that systemd doesn't really hurt.  Once you learn the new location for configurations, and you learn the new commands, it works, roughly as well or badly as the old way.  The transition is painful, because there are lots of mistakes: on the part of the systemd implementation, on the part of the integration that's done by RedHat, and on the part of admins who don't know the right way to do things yet.  Once you are through the transition, it's back to the normal daily grind.

Personally, I'm very glad that I only have to administer (in detail) one FreeBSD server, Raspberry Pis (that don't have much interesting setup), and a few Mac laptops (which require nearly no administration).


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## Snurg (Dec 30, 2017)

malco_2001 said:


> Maybe it is just that the smart people who knew things should work did not work hard enough to maintain projects like consolekit.  I think if systemd, or shims worked in FreeBSD it would be less likely someone would go through a ton of extra effort to make Gnome for example work with consolekit if shims make porting easier.  As to why systemd is being so widely adopted right now in Linux I think it is as simple as a lot of little fragmented projects like consolekit stared to become stagnant, and unmaintained.  So other projects like KDE said well now we have no choice we must embrace logind which is more active.  So then in turn the maintainers of distributions said what choice do we have?  This may not be the case at all but it's the only logical conclusion I can come up with.


Actually, it's systemd which killed consolekit by usurping yet another task.
This points to another topic:
the degeneration into sort of an uniform monolithic monoculture that makes individuality and progress impossible.
Like a slow slide into totalitarianism.

Think about it... what will become of Linux after systemd has eaten all except the kernel?
What remains will be *systemDOS*.
There will be little room for change and improvement.
Stagnation and decay will follow eventually.
And this was how the Soviet Union collapsed...


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## rigoletto@ (Dec 30, 2017)

sidetone said:


> Do the developers of Systemd have degenerative brain tissue? Do they work for a competing proprietary operating system? They ruin software, do they also make others' lives difficult who comes across them?
> 
> Why else would anyone make something so dysfunctional, and claim that it's so great?



They are all (or at least most of them) RHEL employers, and RHEL live from support services. It is very interesting to RHEL if Linux become very fragile and difficult to understand because there will have more profit for -->  RHEL. Same can be said about SUSE.

Aside from RHEL and SUSE, there are no other serious support bussiness available worldwide, nor for Linux neither for *BSD.


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## ralphbsz (Dec 30, 2017)

lebarondemerde said:


> Aside from RHEL and SUSE, there are no other serious support bussiness available worldwide, nor for Linux neither for *BSD.


Except for Accenture, KPMG, CSC, IBM, Lockheed-Martin, HP, SRI, Northrup-Grumman, Thales, EDS, and a host of others.  These are all companies that provide support, in many cases soup-to-nuts, and that includes installing the OS and getting it up and running.  In addition, you can buy servers pre-installed with Linux from the likes of Dell, IBM and HP, and they all end up providing support for the OS.  Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.  While RH is the 400-lbs gorilla of the standalone Linux support market, it is a tiny player in the overall computer services business (which has no single dominant leader).

Where you are right: in the short term, a more difficult-to-use Linux with systemd means more support workload for RHEL (meaning more expenses), and more revenue, as more customers renew their support contracts because running Linux without professional support is outside the skills or wishes of more customers.  In the long run, making Linux hard to use is not a good business strategy.  Remember who RH's real competitors are: Not AIX and HP-UX and Solaris (which are in various shades of dead), and absolutely not FreeBSD (which is mostly a hobbyist operating system), but Windows, and SUSE and CentOS.  In particular CentOS, because it gives you everything RHEL does, just without the costly support contracts and the annoying license management.  For customers with staff skilled enough to run it, CentOS is a good alternative, good for the customer, horrible for RH.


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## MarcoB (Dec 30, 2017)

ronaldlees said:


> Why did I want to install pulseaudio?  Because Firefox (as of 52.0) wants to use only pulseaudio, and no longer just ALSA by itself....


In FreeBSD I have www/firefox-esr installed with (for sound) only the sndio option checked and this works fine, but I don't know for how long. Other annoying thing is the dependency of Gtk3, which pulls in all kinds of Gnome stuff. Firefox ESR is the only version that is still buildable with Gtk2.

Indirectly systemd is affecting FreeBSD more and more.


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## Maelstorm (Dec 30, 2017)

ralphbsz said:


> Not AIX and HP-UX and Solaris (which are in various shades of dead), and absolutely not FreeBSD (which is mostly a hobbyist operating system), but Windows, and SUSE and CentOS.  In particular CentOS, because it gives you everything RHEL does, just without the costly support contracts and the annoying license management.  For customers with staff skilled enough to run it, CentOS is a good alternative, good for the customer, horrible for RH.



The main Linux clusters at Sac State are CentOS.  But they also have a very knowledgeable support staff as well.  I've said this a number of times before...right tool for the job, but I do not care all that much about Linux.

<RANT>

Linux is just the kernel.  The rest is piecemealed together.  This allows maximum flexibility depending on what you are trying to do.  This is Linux's greatest strength, and also its greatest weakness.  You have 15 tools that all do pretty much the same thing, all with different names, command-line options, build options, etc.   I don't need yum, rpm, or whatever...pkg works just fine.  This is why I like *BSD, it's not just a kernel and someone decides to hobble together a userland to make a distribution, it's a complete, integrated OS.  If there's a security hole in sshd, I just `make update` and `make buildworld` and `make installworld`.  With any Linux distro, I have to find the place where sshd lives online, download the new update, figure out how to configure and build it, then install it on the system, and hope it works.  *BSD? It just works.

</RANT>

The Linux kernel itself is actually quite good though.  It's well documented as I have the source code on my computer.  So perhaps we can build a Linux version of FreeBSD.  Linux Kernel, FreeBSD Userland powered by systemd, pulseaudio, and avahi (whatever that is).  It would be the bastardized red-headed step-child of FreeBSD.   <ducks>

I might save that for a heresy thread.


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## vermaden (Dec 31, 2017)

ralphbsz said:


> Where you are right: in the short term, a more difficult-to-use Linux with systemd means more support workload for RHEL (meaning more expenses), and more revenue, as more customers renew their support contracts because running Linux without professional support is outside the skills or wishes of more customers.  In the long run, making Linux hard to use is not a good business strategy.  Remember who RH's real competitors are: Not AIX and HP-UX and Solaris (which are in various shades of dead), and absolutely not FreeBSD (which is mostly a hobbyist operating system), but Windows, and SUSE and CentOS.  In particular CentOS, because it gives you everything RHEL does, just without the costly support contracts and the annoying license management.  For customers with staff skilled enough to run it, CentOS is a good alternative, good for the customer, horrible for RH.


Red Hat does not 'fight' with CentOS, Red Hat and CentOS recently joined forces:



			
				https://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/ said:
			
		

> Red Hat is taking an active role in the CentOS Project to accelerate the development and broaden the reach of projects such as OpenStack by expanding our base of community-oriented users to include those engaged with CentOS now and in the future.
> 
> By working with the CentOS Project, we can reach beyond those actively engaged in platform innovation through Fedora to projects and people in need of a community Linux distribution that’s open to selective modification while remaining relatively stable.



Red Hat support is, same as their Linux, sh!t. We do not use their support because if something is easy to fix, its pointless to make support request as solution is know or easy searchable on the Internet. If something is hard (like some nuances in Red Hat Cluster Suite or some 'internals') then the only thing Red Hat support does good is passing your service request over different time zones to different support people, but as its switched to new guy, he will probably ask You again the same questions ... You may ask why we have Red Hat support at all? Well, so called 'business' wants to and pays for so called support just to have support, because they paid for the database with support, for application servers with support etc.

We often 'split' these 'business' demands into Red Hat for production with support and CentOS or Oracle Linux (which is also RHEL clone) for test/dev.









lebarondemerde said:


> They are all (or at least most of them) RHEL employers, and RHEL live from support services. It is very interesting to RHEL if Linux become very fragile and difficult to understand because there will have more profit for -->  RHEL. Same can be said about SUSE.
> 
> Aside from RHEL and SUSE, there are no other serious support bussiness available worldwide, nor for Linux neither for *BSD.



You can also buy same/similar support from Oracle for their Oracle Linux which is, besides logos/colors, same RHEL clone as CentOS.












ralphbsz said:


> Administering Linux before systemd wasn't trivial either.  The system configuration (both parameters of the kernel and interfaces, and which services to start when and how) was a huge mess beforehand.  Systemd has not removed the mess (it really can't, there are too many moving parts), just arranged it differently.



CentOS/RHEL/Oracle Linux 6.x are easier (or more predictible) to administer then 7.x series with systemd. And its not only about systemd, no sir. Even installer in 7.x series is totally fscked up. For example, if in that 7.x installer You will create pretty standard 'enterprise' setup with two physical network interfaces coupled together into highly available interface *bond0* (*lagg0* on FreeBSD) and then You put a VLAN tag and IP address on that VLAN, then You get total mess which looks like that:


```
# cat /etc/sysconfig/network
# (empty file)

# pwd
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

# ls -1 ifcfg-*
ifcfg-Bond_connection_1
ifcfg-eno49
ifcfg-eno49-1
ifcfg-eno50
ifcfg-eno50-1
ifcfg-VLAN_connection_1

# tail -n 9999999 ifcfg-*
==> ifcfg-Bond_connection_1 <==
DEVICE=bond0
BONDING_OPTS="miimon=1 updelay=0 downdelay=0 mode=active-backup"
TYPE=Bond
BONDING_MASTER=yes
PROXY_METHOD=none
BROWSER_ONLY=no
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
DEFROUTE=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes
IPV6_DEFROUTE=yes
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6_PRIVACY=no
IPV6_ADDR_GEN_MODE=stable-privacy
NAME="Bond connection 1"
UUID=ca85417f-8852-43bf-96ee-5bd3f0f83648
ONBOOT=yes

==> ifcfg-eno49 <==
TYPE=Ethernet
PROXY_METHOD=none
BROWSER_ONLY=no
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
DEFROUTE=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes
IPV6_DEFROUTE=yes
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6_ADDR_GEN_MODE=stable-privacy
NAME=eno49
UUID=2f60f50b-38ad-492a-b90a-ba736acf6792
DEVICE=eno49
ONBOOT=no

==> ifcfg-eno49-1 <==
HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
TYPE=Ethernet
NAME=eno49
UUID=342b8494-126d-4f3a-b749-694c8c922aa1
DEVICE=eno49
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes

==> ifcfg-eno50 <==
TYPE=Ethernet
PROXY_METHOD=none
BROWSER_ONLY=no
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
DEFROUTE=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes
IPV6_DEFROUTE=yes
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6_ADDR_GEN_MODE=stable-privacy
NAME=eno50
UUID=4fd36e24-1c6d-4a65-a316-7a14e9a92965
DEVICE=eno50
ONBOOT=no

==> ifcfg-eno50-1 <==
HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
TYPE=Ethernet
NAME=eno50
UUID=a429b697-73c2-404d-9379-472cb3c35e06
DEVICE=eno50
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes

==> ifcfg-VLAN_connection_1 <==
VLAN=yes
TYPE=Vlan
PHYSDEV=ca85417f-8852-43bf-96ee-5bd3f0f83648
VLAN_ID=601
REORDER_HDR=yes
GVRP=no
MVRP=no
PROXY_METHOD=none
BROWSER_ONLY=no
BOOTPROTO=none
IPADDR=10.20.30.40
PREFIX=24
GATEWAY=10.20.30.1
DEFROUTE=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes
IPV6_DEFROUTE=yes
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6_PRIVACY=no
IPV6_ADDR_GEN_MODE=stable-privacy
NAME="VLAN connection 1"
UUID=90f7a9bb-1443-4adf-a3eb-86a03b23ecfb
ONBOOT=yes
```

For the record, I choose 'STATIC' IPv4 address, but installer made these interfaces to use DHCP AND that STATIC address ... enterprise ...

After manual fixing with *vi(1)* this is how it supposed to look ...


```
# cat /etc/sysconfig/network
GATEWAY=10.20.30.1
NOZEROCONF=yes

# ls -1 ifcfg-*
ifcfg-bond0
ifcfg-bond0.601
ifcfg-eno49
ifcfg-eno50

# tail -n 9999999 ifcfg-*
==> ifcfg-bond0 <==
DEVICE=bond0
BONDING_OPTS="miimon=1 updelay=0 downdelay=0 mode=active-backup"
TYPE=Bond
BONDING_MASTER=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=no
ONBOOT=yes

==> ifcfg-bond0.601 <==
VLAN=yes
TYPE=Vlan
VLAN_ID=601
DEVICE=bond0.601
REORDER_HDR=yes
GVRP=no
MVRP=no
BOOTPROTO=none
IPADDR=10.20.30.40
PREFIX=24
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=no
ONBOOT=yes

==> ifcfg-eno49 <==
BOOTPROTO=none
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=no
TYPE=Ethernet
NAME=eno49
DEVICE=eno49
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes

==> ifcfg-eno50 <==
BOOTPROTO=none
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=no
TYPE=Ethernet
NAME=eno50
DEVICE=eno50
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
```

Not to mention that the same configuration on FreeBSD would be in 7 lines of /etc/rc.conf file:


```
ifconfig_fxp0="up"
ifconfig_fxp1="up"
cloned_interfaces="lagg0"
ifconfig_lagg0="laggproto failover laggport fxp0 laggport fxp1"
vlans_lagg0="601"
ifconfig_lagg0_601="inet 10.20.30.40/24"
defaultrouter="10.20.30.1"
```





Another thing ... if You want to have something executed at boot on 6.x You would put it as /etc/init.d/NAME, then put a link in needed runlevel (rc3.d most of the time) and viola! With systemd You need to create script, then create NAME.service, then systemd creates links to that NAME.service so it will actually eventually run that script ... surely a great improvement :ASD




ralphbsz said:


> And while I have not had to do any serious admin work on a Linux machine since systemd has been in use (matter-of-fact, I have done very little admin stuff on Linux in the last 10 years, with the exception of one Raspberry Pi running Raspbian, which does have systemd), I have friends who administer very complex servers (clusters, with high-end networking, extreme hardware, strange and powerful software), and they say that systemd doesn't really hurt.



Generally administrating Linux is not a pleasant activity, I work with Linux only because I am paid for that, with RHEL/CentOS 7.x its even more PITA because of systemd.


----------



## sidetone (Dec 31, 2017)

MarcoB said:


> Other annoying thing is the dependency of Gtk3, which pulls in all kinds of Gnome stuff. Firefox ESR is the only version that is still buildable with Gtk2.


The gtk3 dependency looks bad, but you can't get far without gtk or qt on a FreeBSD desktop with common software. gtk should be stripped down as much as possible for FreeBSD, however. BSD's don't have their own homegrown full featured graphical toolkit. As of now, without gtk or qt, there aren't fancy scroll bar, tabs, or toolbars. There's X11, and Xaw implements, that work, but are not as fancy. tcl/tk might be ok.

Apart from that, the logo of Gimp for gtk is really strange.


----------



## MarcoB (Dec 31, 2017)

sidetone said:


> The gtk3 dependency looks bad, but you can't get far without gtk or qt on a FreeBSD desktop with common software. gtk should be stripped down as much as possible for FreeBSD, however. BSD's don't have their own homegrown full featured graphical toolkit. As of now, without gtk or qt, there aren't fancy scroll bar, tabs, or toolbars. There's X11, and Xaw implements, that work, but are not as fancy. tcl/tk might be ok.


I don't mind Qt or Gtk2 because they don't pull in dependencies I don't want. Gtk2 is becoming quite old though and is on it's way out, so I use mostly Qt5 for desktop applications. Unfortunately some big and somewhat unavoidable applications like Firefox and Libreoffice are becoming Gtk3 only, and more and more tied to Gnome and Linux/systemd in the future.


----------



## rigoletto@ (Dec 31, 2017)

And there is Gtk4 coming what probably will be even worse than Gtk3. 

EDIT:

```
...
We are going to increase the speed at which we do releases of new major versions of
Gtk(ie: Gtk 4, Gtk 5, Gtk 6…). We want to target a new major release every two years.
This period of time was chosen to line up well with the cadence of many popular Linux
distributions.
...
```
Source.


----------



## Beastie7 (Dec 31, 2017)

There are other alternatives we can resort to if that's the case. KDE has pretty much everything one may need in it's stack. I don't think they depend on systemd, besides replacing console kit with logind.

KDE has been doing a lot of things right, and i'm really liking their insistence on keeping a standard desktop experience. I could see FreeBSD backing it.


----------



## MarcoB (Dec 31, 2017)

lebarondemerde said:


> And there is Gtk4 coming what probably will be even worse than Gtk3.
> 
> EDIT:
> 
> ...


Pff, the Gnome/systemd ecosystem is coming even faster than I thought.


----------



## MarcoB (Dec 31, 2017)

Beastie7 said:


> There are other alternatives we can resort to if that's the case. KDE has pretty much everything one may need in it's stack. I don't think they depend on systemd, besides replacing console kit with logind.
> 
> KDE has been doing a lot of things right, and i'm really liking their insistence on keeping a standard desktop experience. I could see FreeBSD backing it.


FreeBSD is backing it in a way by the TrueOS activities. KDE is probably a better choice for the BSD's in general for these exact reasons. Only thing I hope is that Qt stays independent of KDE because I don't use a DE either, but that's another thread.


----------



## sidetone (Dec 31, 2017)

MarcoB said:


> I don't mind Qt or Gtk2 because they don't pull in dependencies I don't want. Gtk2 is becoming quite old though and is on it's way out, so I use mostly Qt5 for desktop applications. Unfortunately some big and somewhat unavoidable applications like Firefox and Libreoffice are becoming Gtk3 only, and more and more tied to Gnome and Linux/systemd in the future.


You should see how gtk3 manages to mess up an application library for playing 2 second desktop sound themes. audio/libcanberra is for sound, so how do they manage to screw that up, my making its slave port, audio/libcanberra-gtk3, a required dependency for some ports. It is their choice, because those ports belong to them, but they should really split the FreeBSD ports tree, so they can do that, without complicating everything else for us. When trying to untangle graphical dependencies from sound, they try to make it look, like they are logically inseparable, but they really are.

About qt, I like qt4, but qt5 hasn't worked well for me. It crashed and caused building failures all the time.



Beastie7 said:


> KDE has been doing a lot of things right, and i'm really liking their insistence on keeping a standard desktop experience. I could see FreeBSD backing it.


No way. KDE may be better than Gnome for some, but it is another heavy desktop.

Regarding Systemd developers at Redhat:


lebarondemerde said:


> They are all (or at least most of them) RHEL employers, and RHEL live from support services. It is very interesting to RHEL if Linux become very fragile and difficult to understand because there will have more profit for -->  RHEL. Same can be said about SUSE.
> 
> Aside from RHEL and SUSE, there are no other serious support bussiness available worldwide, nor for Linux neither for *BSD.


My impression of Redhat used to be, it was upstanding. Perhaps they still are good, and I understand that they want to make an earning, but from what I hear about Systemd is ... (well, what this thread is about).


----------



## Maelstorm (Jan 2, 2018)

One thing that I want to point out about systemd, from what I have read and from what other have said in this thread, is this:

If you run a multithreaded program with the same exact input, and you get different results, then a race condition exists in that program.  Based on what I have seen, the developers of systemd have some real talent there...  They write crappy software and claim it's the second coming, then when you point out the problems, they fight with you and tell you that it's your problem, not theirs...or it's working as intended...or it's a feature and that you should love it and consider it a privilege because they graced your system with their fabulous code that can walk on water.

How can a race condition be working as intended?  That's the hallmark of real coding talent right there.  Top notch professionalism.

This is a case in point as to why application programmers should not be writing system software.


----------



## Beastie7 (Jan 2, 2018)

Maelstorm said:


> This is a case in point as to why application programmers should not be writing system software.




Not only that, like the Bryan Cantrill said, the Linux community tends to not learn from past mistakes and history in Unix.


----------



## Snurg (Jan 2, 2018)

Maelstorm said:


> ...and claim it's the second coming, then when you point out the problems, they fight with you and tell you that it's your problem, not theirs...


This is a characteristic expression of narcissistic denial.

And the paradox consequence of that is, instead of changing the destructive behavior, it is seen as "alternative-less".
And this leads to continuing this behavior against all resistance.
The final consequence of this is eventually collapse.

Do you know of any analysis of the Linux development psychological dynamics, in special regards to what happened in the course of Poettering taking over more and more of Linux?
Background of my question is that I am thinking much about how psychopaths manage to break rules and dominate, without suffering any real consequences.
There seem to be particular patterns that are always the same, allowing to identify toxic people.

(If you are interested in such things, I recently read a very interesting dossier about the background, how it was possible that a highly narcissistic, probably even psychopathic guy was allowed to fly B-52 jets, in spite of his many violations that would have him grounded permanently under "normal" circumstances. The story ended with this pilot almost crashing a B-52 into a nuclear weapons bunker, killing several people. )


----------



## ralphbsz (Jan 2, 2018)

The deep underlying problem is that the Linux community has a culture that is set by people like Linus, Andy Tridgell, Hans Reiser, Alan Cox, Miguel de Icaza and so on.  And they live in an ecosystem with more sociopaths like Larry McVoy, Eric Raymond, RMS, and so on.  Many of them are really fine software coders, and smart people who can keep enormous complexity in their head, and have an overview over huge systems.  But the basic problem is that these people have little understanding of computer use in the real world, hugely inflated opinions of their own importance, and no system of checks and balances that can tell them "you're wrong".  Two words: arrogant narcissists.  That's one of the reasons why smallish disagreements (like the infamous source control battle between Linus/Andy/Larry over Bitkeeper versus git) can not be resolved sensibly, and turn into personal feuds of an intensity not seen since the middle ages.

There are some perfectly reasonable and nice people in leadership positions of the Gnu/Linux/OSS ecosystem too: Ted Ts'o and Stephen Tweedie come to mind, although I haven't seen Stephen in years; Guido van Rossum also has a reputation of being a good and sensible person (haven't met him though).  Valerie Aurora (formerly Henson, of file system fame) has written some insightful pieces on the destructive culture of the Linux community, with particular emphasis of its rather shoddy treatment of women.  This has led to her leaving the development of Linux.

Yet, this is the software we are stuck with.  Just using systemd as an example: whether we like it or not, whether it has way too many bugs, and whether Lennart is an idiot with good typing skills, we'll use it, because the ecosystem has no other solution.  Example: I have an RPi3 at home, and a few months ago I gave up on running FreeBSD on it, because too many things were too difficult, things that just run seamlessly under Raspbian.  So now I'm stuck with Linux, and as of the week before Christmas my Pi is actually in "production" (installed in my pump shed, monitoring water tank level and pump pressure).  But I got tired of having to restart the monitoring program after every power outage by hand, so I wrote a service description file for systemd.  Took me over half an hour to get right, but fortunately the web is full of pages (mostly half true) that explain how to do it.  Now it works.  On FreeBSD it would have taken one minute, but that's only because there I have the daily experience of administering the system.  The important part is: in many scenarios (like wanting to run on an RPi3 with wireless) there is no alternative to Linux, and we'll use systemd.  And with a little effort and some gritting of teeth, systemd is usable.

Which has no bearing on whether FreeBSD should use systemd or not.  My personal opinion is that it should not, because otherwise it will just become a Linux clone with a slightly different kernel implementation.  Instead, FreeBSD could tune and improve the existing init system to match some of the benefits (like defaulting to parallel init for faster boot times).  This may lead to incompatibilities with desktop environments and end-user tools that rely on systemd, but maybe people who need/want those things will be better off in the Linux ecosystem.


----------



## rigoletto@ (Jan 2, 2018)

systemd Breached One Million Lines Of Code In 2017


----------



## Maelstorm (Jan 2, 2018)

Snurg said:


> This is a characteristic expression of narcissistic denial.
> 
> And the paradox consequence of that is, instead of changing the destructive behavior, it is seen as "alternative-less".
> And this leads to continuing this behavior against all resistance.
> The final consequence of this is eventually collapse.


I agree with you there.  Unfortunately, the problem is that if there are a number of heavyweights backing a project, collapse is unlikely.


Snurg said:


> Do you know of any analysis of the Linux development psychological dynamics, in special regards to what happened in the course of Poettering taking over more and more of Linux?


Never considered it before, but I have come across some "interesting" personalities in my time.  I know very little about psychology, I haven't had any formal classes on the subject, and I am by no means an expert.  Most of what I know is based on internet research and my interactions with people who have certain mental deficiencies (mental illnesses such as autism, dissociative identity disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, narcissism, psychopath, sociopath, depression, etc...).  But the background that you mentioned is interesting.



Snurg said:


> Background of my question is that I am thinking much about how psychopaths manage to break rules and dominate, without suffering any real consequences.
> There seem to be particular patterns that are always the same, allowing to identify toxic people.


I have always kinda wondered how toxic people do what they do and still manage to come out on top.  Their thinking is weird and not normal.  But then again, I am by no means an expert.



ralphbsz said:


> The deep underlying problem is that the Linux community has a culture that is set by people like Linus, Andy Tridgell, Hans Reiser, Alan Cox, Miguel de Icaza and so on.  And they live in an ecosystem with more sociopaths like Larry McVoy, Eric Raymond, RMS, and so on.  Many of them are really fine software coders, and smart people who can keep enormous complexity in their head, and have an overview over huge systems.  But the basic problem is that these people have little understanding of computer use in the real world, hugely inflated opinions of their own importance, and no system of checks and balances that can tell them "you're wrong".  Two words: arrogant narcissists.  That's one of the reasons why smallish disagreements (like the infamous source control battle between Linus/Andy/Larry over Bitkeeper versus git) can not be resolved sensibly, and turn into personal feuds of an intensity not seen since the middle ages.


The only people that I know about are Linus and RMS.  I have heard about Hans and Alan though.  But from what I have seen of Linus's posts on mailing lists is that he does admit when he is wrong.  I have also seen him ask for help, and I have seen him chew out people who needed it...such as one of the developers of systemd when he banned that person from suggesting changes for the Linux kernel.  He had quite a bit to say about it too: https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/2/420  As for Richard Stallman, I do respect his work and his contributions to open source software in general.  His contributions are significant.  However, I do not entirely agree with his politics.  Mainly his GPL, which is a political software license.  Even saying that, it does have it's benefits when someone goes out of control, like Sony-BGM did a number of years ago with their rootkit on Windows systems.  I don't really keep up on the infighting of the various projects, but I'm sure everyone has them.  From my understanding, DragonflyBSD forked off from FreeBSD because of such a disagreement.


ralphbsz said:


> There are some perfectly reasonable and nice people in leadership positions of the Gnu/Linux/OSS ecosystem too: Ted Ts'o and Stephen Tweedie come to mind, although I haven't seen Stephen in years; Guido van Rossum also has a reputation of being a good and sensible person (haven't met him though).  Valerie Aurora (formerly Henson, of file system fame) has written some insightful pieces on the destructive culture of the Linux community, with particular emphasis of its rather shoddy treatment of women.  This has led to her leaving the development of Linux.


And that is too bad as I am a firm believer in having women in technology related fields.  I have seen time and time again women being ostracized from tech by the constant bullying, doxxing, harassment, threats, etc... from chauvinistic pigs and it really pisses me off.  You mainly see this on twitter, which is why I refuse to have a twitter account.


ralphbsz said:


> Yet, this is the software we are stuck with.  Just using systemd as an example: whether we like it or not, whether it has way too many bugs, and whether Lennart is an idiot with good typing skills, we'll use it, because the ecosystem has no other solution.  The important part is: in many scenarios (like wanting to run on an RPi3 with wireless) there is no alternative to Linux, and we'll use systemd.  And with a little effort and some gritting of teeth, systemd is usable.


It's because of the Linux community that we have the tech environment that we do.  Right tool for the job.  Don't get me wrong, although *BSD has been around at least a decade longer than Linux, it was the publicity of Linux that made open source software almost a household term.  Because of that popularity, you see these interesting personalities within the Linux community.  It's the same reason we have the uptake of Windows and OSX, advertising.  It's a double edged sword though, the more popular an operating system becomes, the larger the target on it's back is painted.  That's why just about all the malware out there is Windows based.  Besides, systemd is/was a solution looking for a problem.  Necessity is the mother of invention.  I envision someone getting fed up with systemd and writing an alternative solution which may be better or worse than systemd.  Ecosystems are funny that way.  I suspect (and others have said as much) the reason why systemd has been adopted is because of its' backing from Red Hat.


ralphbsz said:


> Which has no bearing on whether FreeBSD should use systemd or not.  My personal opinion is that it should not, because otherwise it will just become a Linux clone with a slightly different kernel implementation.  Instead, FreeBSD could tune and improve the existing init system to match some of the benefits (like defaulting to parallel init for faster boot times).  This may lead to incompatibilities with desktop environments and end-user tools that rely on systemd, but maybe people who need/want those things will be better off in the Linux ecosystem.


Well, systemd is a Linux specific monster.  Instead of making parallel bootup the default, make it an option instead.  Based on what I have read about systemd, I think I can see how something like that would work within the current init framework.  For example, just about everything depends on network and syslogd, so those start up in serial.  But, things that are independent of each other (telnetd, ftpd, sshd, sendmail, whateverd... ) can start up in parallel.  So you would have a series of serial and parallel startups.  It would be more reliable I think than systemd ever could be.  As an added benefit, it wouldn't be hard to make the modifications to make it work that way either, and there is no inherent race condition, so the behavior is predictable.

The idea behind systemd **IS** a good idea, but the execution of that idea leaves much to be desired.


----------



## rigoletto@ (Jan 2, 2018)

Maelstorm

OpenRC have an optional parallel boot method but I never looked on it.


----------



## aragats (Jan 2, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> I have an RPi3 at home, and a few months ago I gave up on running FreeBSD on it, because too many things were too difficult, things that just run seamlessly under Raspbian. So now I'm stuck with Linux, and as of the week before Christmas my Pi is actually in "production" (installed in my pump shed, monitoring water tank level and pump pressure). But I got tired of having to restart the monitoring program after every power outage by hand, so I wrote a service description file for systemd.


Fortunately, it's still possible to do without _systemd_. I'm using BeagleBone Black in real production (as a part of a commercial device), and the first thing I did at the very beginning of that project was replacing _systemd_ with _OpenRC_ in Debian. We don't care about parallel boot, so never tried it. Everything perfectly works without _systemd_, the device performs tons of real world IO ops and runs a graphical application as well.


----------



## ralphbsz (Jan 2, 2018)

(Off-topic, but then on-topic again



aragats said:


> Fortunately, it's still possible to do without _systemd_. ... was replacing _systemd_ with _OpenRC_ in Debian.


Well darn it, now you added another to-do item to my never-ending list: Modify Raspbian to run without systemd.  Which is made even more difficult by the fact that I currently have only one RPi at home, which is now in "production" (measuring the water pressure every second), so I can't take it down to experiment with init systems.  I guess I'll order myself a second one tonight, need a spare anyway.  And then I'll spend long evenings messing with it, when I should be doing something more productive (like finish the remodeling of one bedroom at home, but you can only do drywall and flooring for so long before you get tired).

The part that's on-topic: Good to see that even in Debian (-> Raspbian) there are still options to run without systemd, if you are not interested in integration with gnome and friends.  This is to some extent a bankruptcy declaration of the systemd project: it is broken enough that people insist on not using it.


----------



## Beastie7 (Jan 2, 2018)

lebarondemerde said:


> systemd Breached One Million Lines Of Code In 2017



This is actually quite funny. I wouldn't be surprised if a massive systemd exploit surfaces and blows up the Linux ecosystem. Hell.. it's even bigger than ZFS itself!


----------



## dinsdale (Jan 3, 2018)

sidetone said:


> Maelstorm just created a &@#!storm in here. vermaden just let it out. Anyone familiar with these forums would know the reaction to this topic.
> 
> Sort of. For customized configurations, there's also /etc/rc.conf.local or /usr/local/etc/rc.conf. There's also the defaults to be overridden at /etc/defaults/rc.conf. Still, this is very simple.



What about loader.conf, sysctl.conf, inetd.conf and everything in rc.conf.d? If you use jails then there is a per jail conf. Init is anything but simple IMHO. That is not a defense of any 1M+ monster of a second coming of the Linux kernel. BUT, I as someone who works on distributed systems can say with no humor: tighter integration of subsystems has many many benefits.


----------



## dinsdale (Jan 3, 2018)

vermaden said:


> Lennart Poettering is responsible for writing this shit, same with Avahi and PulseAudio.
> 
> 
> Do You really believe that systemd is engineered or is it just like that:
> ...



"Systemd situation in the Linux ecosystem is quite like" ... Quite inappropriate and exceptionally offensive.


----------



## Snurg (Jan 3, 2018)

dinsdale said:


> "Systemd situation in the Linux ecosystem is quite like" ... Quite inappropriate and exceptionally offensive.


It's blunt and true.
Isn't it well-known that some particular kinds of people who cannot stand uncomfortable truth feel offended when somebody bluntly says the truth?
Isn't it a widespread psychological defense reaction when people use the accusation of being offensive as means to suppress critic discussions which endanger particular loved beliefs?

Did you read Valerie Aurora's articles about how physical the abuse in the linux community actually is?


----------



## sidetone (Jan 3, 2018)

dinsdale said:


> What about loader.conf, sysctl.conf, inetd.conf and everything in rc.conf.d? If you use jails then there is a per jail conf. Init is anything but simple IMHO. That is not a defense of any 1M+ monster of a second coming of the Linux kernel. BUT, I as someone who works on distributed systems can say with no humor: tighter integration of subsystems has many many benefits.


All in etc/ or /boot/ directories.
rc.conf calls up rc.d/.
It's pretty simple.


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## scottro (Jan 3, 2018)

Am I misunderstanding, or are we now judging Linux quality on the fact that a file system was developed by someone who later admitted to murder?  
What about the people who make death threats to Mr. Poettering?   Where do they fit in?


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## vermaden (Jan 3, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> Example: I have an RPi3 at home, and a few months ago I gave up on running FreeBSD on it, because too many things were too difficult, things that just run seamlessly under Raspbian.



Could You elaborate more on that?


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## ralphbsz (Jan 3, 2018)

The biggest problem was wireless.  The second-biggest one having to recompile (poudriere, crochet, ...) for 1-wire support.  There was also on attempt using kivy on framebuffer on the official display, which didn't work quickly, and on Raspbian ended up trivial.

It's not that FreeBSD on the RPi is completely broken.  But a few thing were just way more difficult than swallowing and using Linux.  I don't use FreeBSD for religious reasons or as a calling, but to get stuff done, and if Linux gets me there more efficiently (in the long run), I'll use it.


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## vermaden (Jan 3, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> The biggest problem was wireless.  The second-biggest one having to recompile (poudriere, crochet, ...) for 1-wire support.  There was also on attempt using kivy on framebuffer on the official display, which didn't work quickly, and on Raspbian ended up trivial.
> 
> It's not that FreeBSD on the RPi is completely broken.  But a few thing were just way more difficult than swallowing and using Linux.  I don't use FreeBSD for religious reasons or as a calling, but to get stuff done, and if Linux gets me there more efficiently (in the long run), I'll use it.


Thanks for sharing.

I got RPI2 instead of RPI3 because FreeBSD Wiki stated that everything is supported for RPI2, while RPI3 had a lot of '?' states.

FreeBSD, at least in headless mode, works like a charm on RPI2.


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## Birdy (Jan 3, 2018)

Snurg said:


> (semi-OT)
> Sociopathy seems a big societal taboo for various reasons, one of them being the fact that many people would be seen less idealistic if knowledge about the subject would be more widespread.


A modest contribution to a better understanding and defense against it: see here.


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## Snurg (Jan 3, 2018)

Birdy, thank you very much! I bing-ed, found some quotes from that book and ordered it immediately!

Edit: I should duckduckgo really


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## Maelstorm (Jan 3, 2018)

Semi-OT



Snurg said:


> (semi-OT)
> 
> Maelstorm, I mean another kind of collapse: when the software becomes unusable, unpredictable. Race conditions piling up are an example. When the design flaws become so complexly tangled that even bugs cannot be fixed anymore because that would break workarounds for other bugs etc.


Usually, when software gets to that point, it's time for a complete rewrite.



Snurg said:


> Regarding sociopathy, I am no expert either.  But I am strongly negatively affected from of sociopaths in my family and I am damaged by this also (wrong programming in a narcisstic-sociopathic manner). It find it so sad that there is often little information seeping to outsiders what happens in (semi-)closed circles, because this makes finding the common parallels more difficult.



For some reason, my brother likes these mentally deranged women.  His current girlfriend suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.  When she is off her meds, the conversations are **VERY** interesting.  As for me, I generally get along well with others, work well in teams, and I am generally well liked.  I do have my quirks, but so does everyone else.



Snurg said:


> Sociopathy seems a big societal taboo for various reasons, one of them being the fact that many people would be seen less idealistic if knowledge about the subject would be more widespread.  Another reason is the complicity that people do not like to be aware of.  The lack of humility and the unwillingness to put oneself (and the adored ones) into critical questioning is, in my impression like a vicious circle that destroys society and humanity.  Because, when one deems him/herself "infallibly correct", without any humility, there is obviously no need to listen to others, or even start with working to change oneself.  And this produces ethics like Skhreli, Poettering, Mengele etc.



Sociopathy and psychopathy are two sides of the same coin which is known as antisocial personality disorder.  Apparently there is very little difference between the two, except how loud Jiminy Cricket is.  A sociopath does have a Jiminy Cricket, but for whatever reason, his volume is turned down, and therefore usually ignored.  In a psychopath, Jiminy Cricket has taken a permanent vacation.  Aside, I understand that people from different cultures will not know who Jiminy Cricket is.  He is a character from a Disney movie (Pinocchio, 1940) who represents the inner voice of a conscious, or the ability to discern right from wrong, a moral center, moral compass, etc....

Here's a link: https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/sociopath-psychopath-difference#1

I think the main reason that you see people with antisocial personality disorder more often in software development is due to the fact that they can keep their interaction with other people to a minimum.  Software development (and technology in general) is one of the few professions (that I can think of) where having high marks in social skills is not a requirement.  People do have to be employed so they can eat.



Snurg said:


> Hans Reiser is a really interesting example of a Linux guy. One could say, the murderer quote in the Linux kernel development team is probably highest of all OSes. What I find amazing is that he said as reason for strangling his woman, he did it to "protect" the children.  Reiser, like Mrs. Knorr and other sociopaths seem to feel _entitled_ to do the things they do.  Marino seems to have felt entitled also to the things which led him to be kicked from the FreeBSD team.



The 'murder quote' caught my interest so I did a little bit of research.  I don't keep up with the politics of different projects, so when I find out about something going on, I do a little bit of reading for the background (so I can have an intelligent conversation) and then post to get more info about the subject...like this thread.  So, in following my pattern, I did a bit of digging and found this article about his trial on Wired:

https://www.wired.com/2008/04/reiser-guilty-o/

In my opinion, that guy has issues.



Snurg said:


> I think it's also about the culture, including the way people treat each other.  Because, this also has influence how teams cooperate, collaborate and what the produce outcome is.


Agreed.



Snurg said:


> Culture has to do with tradition and values, too.
> In this sense I just thought, maybe BSD culture has something like conservative tradition, learning from experience, respecting of the insights gained, which includes not to change things that work fine.
> Linux culture in contrast looks like a fashion culture, new modic trends are constantly being followed, proven functional traditions are boring, constant change for the sake of change. Like throwing away your clothes from last year, not because they are worn, just because other things have become fad.


I guess the *BSD's are the right OS for me then, because I still have clothes that I wear from 5 years ago.



Snurg said:


> Searching for death threats against Poettering, I found only this at Bing.  The article is quite interesting. It seems in line with Valerie Aurora's reports, whose descriptions remind me of the so widespread and massive sexual assaults committed by Arabic and African "refugees" in Europe.  (The situation has grown so mad that in Berlin the police had to set up "safe zones", where women could celebrate New Years Eve without fear of being groped or even raped by packs of young "refugees".)
> 
> This behavior shows a "culture" without respect for the other, especially women, that these seem to have in common with Linux culture.
> And I do not think such is good.



At 44, I'm an older college student.  Because of my situation, I live on campus when school is in.  My major is Computer Science.  I've been writing software since I was a kid, but on deciding on a path for a career change, I decided to get a degree and do software development.  I am going for certificates in Systems Software and Cyber Defense and Operations.  My other favorite subject is electronics...so much so that I have an associates degree in it, emphasis on digital electronics.

Anyways, you bring up an interesting point.  Although not mentioned in news all that much, there is a thing on campus known as rape culture.  It *IS* a big problem on college campuses here in the US.  So much so that all new university students are forced to take mandatory online classes for sexual harassment, substance abuse, etc....  Even at CSU Sacramento (http://www.csus.edu/) where I am currently attending, you hear all the time about reports to campus police about sexual harassment and assault.  The assault is mostly groping.  Cases of outright rape are, thankfully, few and far between.  But yes, one rape is one too many, but this is getting way off-topic...related, but off-topic.


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## Maelstorm (Jan 3, 2018)

Beastie7 said:


> This is actually quite funny. I wouldn't be surprised if a massive systemd exploit surfaces and blows up the Linux ecosystem. Hell.. it's even bigger than ZFS itself!



Funny you should mention that.  I just read a news article about Intel x86-64 chips manufactured over the past decade having a massive security flaw...in hardware.

https://gizmodo.com/report-all-intel-processors-made-in-the-last-decade-mi-1821728240

I'm going to make a separate thread about this.


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## DutchDaemon (Jan 3, 2018)

I'm not quite sure how this topic derailed into broad culture wars and unsubstantiated fear mongering and political sophistry, but it's quite enough. Closed.


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