Discussion:
Where did Microsoft go wrong?
(too old to reply)
gareth evans
2020-09-05 19:57:50 UTC
Permalink
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.

W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.

So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Bob Eager
2020-09-05 20:40:31 UTC
Permalink
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft provided products
to help you control your computer, but with W10 they are trying to
control the way you use the computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC I buy will be LINUX
based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft customer and user,
they have finally succeeded in driving me away.
It didn't take that long for me. I was using UNIX years before MS-DIS
existed. I started with PC-DOS 2.0 (free copy) when I was asked to write
a book on it.

I still have Windows, but only for specialist software - my chip
programmer, and instrumentation software for the electronics stuff
(scope, function generator, etc.)
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
2020-09-05 21:44:42 UTC
Permalink
On Sat, 5 Sep 2020 20:57:50 +0100
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS
Was OK ish.
Post by gareth evans
and early versions of Windows,
Wouldn't run multiple DOS applications, I wasn't impressed.
Post by gareth evans
Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
Hmm, "DOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't run" - remember that ?
Post by gareth evans
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
Not new.
Post by gareth evans
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
They never managed to attract me in the first place, but then the
first time I came across the idea that their code might not be the best was
at Newbury Labs when Basil's student programmer (whose name I think was
Clive but ICBW) came down the stairs shouting "We've done it, we've got 16K
BASIC into 4K of ROM", meaning all the features of a typical Microsoft 16K
BASIC.
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/
Charlie Gibbs
2020-09-08 21:10:39 UTC
Permalink
Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
On Sat, 5 Sep 2020 20:57:50 +0100
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS
Was OK ish.
Post by gareth evans
and early versions of Windows,
Wouldn't run multiple DOS applications, I wasn't impressed.
Post by gareth evans
Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
Hmm, "DOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't run" - remember that ?
Yup. Also, later, "Best viewed with Internet Explorer".
Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
Post by gareth evans
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
Not new.
No, but the coercion is getting noticeably stronger.
Sort of like macOS.
Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
Post by gareth evans
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
They never managed to attract me in the first place, but then the
first time I came across the idea that their code might not be the best was
at Newbury Labs when Basil's student programmer (whose name I think was
Clive but ICBW) came down the stairs shouting "We've done it, we've got 16K
BASIC into 4K of ROM", meaning all the features of a typical Microsoft 16K
BASIC.
My reasons are far more mundane. Like the COPY command refusing to
copy a zero-length file - although it would still delete a file of the
same name if one already existed. That little "feature" made a beta
site die, and took a month's worth of data with it.

Or Windows' lackadaisical attitude about deleting files. "OK, I'll
do it - when I feel like getting around to it." So if your program
copies a file to a work file, making changes as it goes, then deletes
the file and renames the work file back to the original name, there's
a small but finite chance that the rename will fail because the delete
hasn't yet been done. If you have 1000 customers running that program
a couple of times daily, it won't be long before you get anguished
calls about missing files.

Microsoft has some serious philosophical problems, which are
too deeply ingrained in the corporate culture for me to ever
feel safe with them.
--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <***@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.
Jorgen Grahn
2020-09-05 22:50:48 UTC
Permalink
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.

/Jorgen
--
// Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Oo o. . .
\X/ snipabacken.se> O o .
J. Clarke
2020-09-05 23:35:22 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jorgen Grahn
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.
Or even (shhh) OS/X.
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
2020-09-06 06:12:04 UTC
Permalink
On Sat, 05 Sep 2020 19:35:22 -0400
Post by J. Clarke
Post by Jorgen Grahn
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.
Or even (shhh) OS/X.
I don't think you can do that legally.
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/
Peter Flass
2020-09-06 00:59:22 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jorgen Grahn
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.
I tend to never get rid of an OS - I always have the nagging feeling that
there’s something on the machine I will need later. Most systems give you
the option to Install in a partition, but older systems usually don’t have
enough disk. You might as well buy a new system. I’m considering installing
OS/2 in a partition, or picking up a cheap second-hand machine. I’m tired
of VirtualBox.
--
Pete
J. Clarke
2020-09-06 02:07:45 UTC
Permalink
Post by Peter Flass
Post by Jorgen Grahn
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.
I tend to never get rid of an OS - I always have the nagging feeling that
there’s something on the machine I will need later. Most systems give you
the option to Install in a partition, but older systems usually don’t have
enough disk. You might as well buy a new system. I’m considering installing
OS/2 in a partition, or picking up a cheap second-hand machine. I’m tired
of VirtualBox.
By OS/2 do you mean EcomStation? If not I suspect OS/2 is not going
to have a clue what to do with most modern physical hardware.
Peter Flass
2020-09-06 13:30:30 UTC
Permalink
Post by J. Clarke
Post by Peter Flass
Post by Jorgen Grahn
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.
I tend to never get rid of an OS - I always have the nagging feeling that
there’s something on the machine I will need later. Most systems give you
the option to Install in a partition, but older systems usually don’t have
enough disk. You might as well buy a new system. I’m considering installing
OS/2 in a partition, or picking up a cheap second-hand machine. I’m tired
of VirtualBox.
By OS/2 do you mean EcomStation? If not I suspect OS/2 is not going
to have a clue what to do with most modern physical hardware.
Actually Arcae Noae now, I think the eComStation people aren’t doing much
development. Arca Noae is still being actively developed.
--
Pete
J. Clarke
2020-09-06 14:02:18 UTC
Permalink
Post by Peter Flass
Post by J. Clarke
Post by Peter Flass
Post by Jorgen Grahn
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.
I tend to never get rid of an OS - I always have the nagging feeling that
there’s something on the machine I will need later. Most systems give you
the option to Install in a partition, but older systems usually don’t have
enough disk. You might as well buy a new system. I’m considering installing
OS/2 in a partition, or picking up a cheap second-hand machine. I’m tired
of VirtualBox.
By OS/2 do you mean EcomStation? If not I suspect OS/2 is not going
to have a clue what to do with most modern physical hardware.
Actually Arcae Noae now, I think the eComStation people aren’t doing much
development. Arca Noae is still being actively developed.
Thank you. I lost track of OS/2 development somewhere along the line.
Looks like Arca Noae bought what remained of eComStation.
Bud Spencer
2020-09-06 14:47:18 UTC
Permalink
Actually Arcae Noae now, I think the eComStation people aren’t doing much
development. Arca Noae is still being actively developed.
Actually Arca OS. Arca Noae is company developing Arca OS.


/
Bud
/

a1=S0
b1=[1..2,'L0L']
a2=2*a1
a3=S1.4#b1
a4=(a2,a3)
a5=64*a4
Jorgen Grahn
2020-09-06 08:12:18 UTC
Permalink
Post by Peter Flass
Post by Jorgen Grahn
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.
I tend to never get rid of an OS - I always have the nagging feeling that
there’s something on the machine I will need later.
I have that feeling too. Had to fight it at work this week: we got
new laptops and had to hand in our old ones, after copying whatever we
needed. I /think/ I got all I needed; time will tell.

I remembered things I usually forget: my ssh keys, some stuff from the
Windows registry, and my hundreds of Firefox tabs. But now I have to
configure things like Office, Outlook and Windows itself -- I don't
know how to backup things like the Windows keyboard autorepeat rate.

/Jorgen
--
// Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Oo o. . .
\X/ snipabacken.se> O o .
gareth evans
2020-09-06 15:23:34 UTC
Permalink
Post by Peter Flass
Post by Jorgen Grahn
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.
I tend to never get rid of an OS - I always have the nagging feeling that
there’s something on the machine I will need later. Most systems give you
the option to Install in a partition, but older systems usually don’t have
enough disk. You might as well buy a new system. I’m considering installing
OS/2 in a partition, or picking up a cheap second-hand machine. I’m tired
of VirtualBox.
The oldest machine still usable here is a W95 laptop with and LCD screen
only 6 inches wide!

(Used for the ICOM PCR1000 RX)
gareth evans
2020-09-06 15:19:38 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jorgen Grahn
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
You don't have to wait; if all important hardware in your current
PC is supported, you can blow away Windows and install Linux on it
tomorrow. Ubuntu Linux is a popular choice.
SWMBO is an occasional user of this PC, and it'd be
impossible to retrain her.

But starting from scratch on a new PC will be much easier.

I do have a LINUX dual booting on a single processor laptop,
where the LINUX is faster to boot up than the native XP on it,
but it only gets an airing once a week and that only to keep
the battery topped up.
Bob Eager
2020-09-06 22:51:05 UTC
Permalink
SWMBO is an occasional user of this PC, and it'd be impossible to
retrain her.
Here, I have my own FreeBSD desktop and also a Windows one for when there
is no alternative (e.g. the chip programmer).

SWMBO also has a FreeBSD desktop and a Windows one.

All the servers are FreeBSD. Other machines include fource PDP-11s and
three VAXes!
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Joe Pfeiffer
2020-09-05 23:01:03 UTC
Permalink
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Grew up on BSD Unix on a VAXen. When I got my first Windows laptop
(running 3.11 on a compaq Concerto) I lasted about a week before I
started looking into how to install Linux.
Bob Eager
2020-09-06 08:23:40 UTC
Permalink
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft provided products
to help you control your computer, but with W10 they are trying to
control the way you use the computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC I buy will be LINUX
based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft customer and user,
they have finally succeeded in driving me away.
Grew up on BSD Unix on a VAXen. When I got my first Windows laptop
(running 3.11 on a compaq Concerto) I lasted about a week before I
started looking into how to install Linux.
Me too. Only it was Sixth Edition on a PDP-11, then the VAX, then others.

But I went from BSD on VAX and successors, to FreeBSD on the PC.
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Scott Lurndal
2020-09-06 20:03:32 UTC
Permalink
Post by Bob Eager
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft provided products
to help you control your computer, but with W10 they are trying to
control the way you use the computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC I buy will be LINUX
based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft customer and user,
they have finally succeeded in driving me away.
Grew up on BSD Unix on a VAXen. When I got my first Windows laptop
(running 3.11 on a compaq Concerto) I lasted about a week before I
started looking into how to install Linux.
Me too. Only it was Sixth Edition on a PDP-11, then the VAX, then others.
Similar progression for me - sixth edition on a 11/34, a set of four
780's (linked with an MA780 shared memory unit); mostly ran VMS,
but we ran the 32-bit Unix from WE on vax A during weekends.

SVR3.2, SVR4, SVR4.2ES/MP, Unixware 2.1, and RH7, RH8, RHEL, Centos, Scientific
Linux, and the occasional Suse SLES.

Over forty years of kernel development starting on the 11/34 (v6 drivers).
Joe Pfeiffer
2020-09-06 23:26:50 UTC
Permalink
Post by Scott Lurndal
Post by Bob Eager
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft provided products
to help you control your computer, but with W10 they are trying to
control the way you use the computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC I buy will be LINUX
based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft customer and user,
they have finally succeeded in driving me away.
Grew up on BSD Unix on a VAXen. When I got my first Windows laptop
(running 3.11 on a compaq Concerto) I lasted about a week before I
started looking into how to install Linux.
Me too. Only it was Sixth Edition on a PDP-11, then the VAX, then others.
Similar progression for me - sixth edition on a 11/34, a set of four
780's (linked with an MA780 shared memory unit); mostly ran VMS,
but we ran the 32-bit Unix from WE on vax A during weekends.
When we (UWash Computer Science Teaching Lab) got our VAX, it was
running VMS. I was a student lab assistant when we switched to Unix,
and I argued long and hard against the change. I've seldom been so
happy (in retrospect) to have lost an argument.
gareth evans
2020-09-06 15:20:33 UTC
Permalink
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Grew up on BSD Unix on a VAXen. When I got my first Windows laptop
(running 3.11 on a compaq Concerto) I lasted about a week before I
started looking into how to install Linux.
Grew up on naked PDP11 with no OS at all!
Peter Flass
2020-09-06 18:14:32 UTC
Permalink
Post by gareth evans
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Grew up on BSD Unix on a VAXen. When I got my first Windows laptop
(running 3.11 on a compaq Concerto) I lasted about a week before I
started looking into how to install Linux.
Grew up on naked PDP11 with no OS at all!
I’m envious.
--
Pete
Thomas Koenig
2020-09-07 05:27:53 UTC
Permalink
Post by Peter Flass
Post by gareth evans
Grew up on naked PDP11 with no OS at all!
I’m envious.
There are / were computers that could still be understood, in both
hardware and software, by a single person. The C-64 was such a
machine - you had full ROM listings, plus the hardware specs of
the different chips were well known. You just had to buy a couple
of books and work through them.

It is probably safe to say that the VAX under VMS was beyond that,
as are modern PCs. IBM/360 probably was incomprehensible from
the very beginning :-)

What about the PDP-11, where was it on that trajectory?
Bob Eager
2020-09-07 08:32:21 UTC
Permalink
Post by Thomas Koenig
Post by Peter Flass
Post by gareth evans
Grew up on naked PDP11 with no OS at all!
I’m envious.
There are / were computers that could still be understood, in both
hardware and software, by a single person. The C-64 was such a machine
- you had full ROM listings, plus the hardware specs of the different
chips were well known. You just had to buy a couple of books and work
through them.
It is probably safe to say that the VAX under VMS was beyond that,
as are modern PCs. IBM/360 probably was incomprehensible from the very
beginning :-)
What about the PDP-11, where was it on that trajectory?
You could do prertty much everything. DEC's engineering philosophy was
that you could find everything.

I have just been working on a 'lost' operating system for te PDP-11. I
found everything I needed to know, down to the last bit controlling the
CPU, instruction set, peripheral programming, the lot. I had to write
quite a lot of code (starting with a boot block). Much of it in
assembler, or modifying a compiler to generate better code.

I haven't had to guess or reverse engineer anything - it was all there.
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
gareth evans
2020-09-07 10:01:23 UTC
Permalink
Post by Thomas Koenig
Post by Peter Flass
Post by gareth evans
Grew up on naked PDP11 with no OS at all!
I’m envious.
There are / were computers that could still be understood, in both
hardware and software, by a single person. The C-64 was such a
machine - you had full ROM listings, plus the hardware specs of
the different chips were well known. You just had to buy a couple
of books and work through them.
It is probably safe to say that the VAX under VMS was beyond that,
as are modern PCs. IBM/360 probably was incomprehensible from
the very beginning :-)
What about the PDP-11, where was it on that trajectory?
Dead easy; you had a processor manual giving all the instructions
together with I/O interfacing requirements, and, additionally you
got countless (about A3 size) books of circuits!
Peter Flass
2020-09-07 17:28:47 UTC
Permalink
Post by Thomas Koenig
Post by Peter Flass
Post by gareth evans
Grew up on naked PDP11 with no OS at all!
I’m envious.
There are / were computers that could still be understood, in both
hardware and software, by a single person. The C-64 was such a
machine - you had full ROM listings, plus the hardware specs of
the different chips were well known. You just had to buy a couple
of books and work through them.
It is probably safe to say that the VAX under VMS was beyond that,
as are modern PCs. IBM/360 probably was incomprehensible from
the very beginning :-)
The hardware was pretty obvious. MVS is opaque, but CP67 (VM/370) had full
listings and was pretty straightforward, from what I’ve seen.
Post by Thomas Koenig
What about the PDP-11, where was it on that trajectory?
--
Pete
Dan Espen
2020-09-07 17:50:17 UTC
Permalink
Post by Thomas Koenig
IBM/360 probably was incomprehensible from
the very beginning :-)
I was able to read and comprehend POPs but it took an inordinate
amount of effort.

My intent was to be able to write my own stuff and avoid IBMs
lackluster products. After seeing what I was up against
I gave up.

So, I'm going to say incomprehensible is fair.
--
Dan Espen
Bob Eager
2020-09-06 22:48:52 UTC
Permalink
Post by gareth evans
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft provided products
to help you control your computer, but with W10 they are trying to
control the way you use the computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC I buy will be LINUX
based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft customer and user,
they have finally succeeded in driving me away.
Grew up on BSD Unix on a VAXen. When I got my first Windows laptop
(running 3.11 on a compaq Concerto) I lasted about a week before I
started looking into how to install Linux.
Grew up on naked PDP11 with no OS at all!
I did that too. Part wrote an OS for PDP-11, and worked on the compiler
for it.

Currently restoring a non-DEC PDP-11 OS from partial sources.
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
gareth evans
2020-09-07 09:58:09 UTC
Permalink
Post by Bob Eager
Post by gareth evans
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft provided products
to help you control your computer, but with W10 they are trying to
control the way you use the computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC I buy will be LINUX
based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft customer and user,
they have finally succeeded in driving me away.
Grew up on BSD Unix on a VAXen. When I got my first Windows laptop
(running 3.11 on a compaq Concerto) I lasted about a week before I
started looking into how to install Linux.
Grew up on naked PDP11 with no OS at all!
I did that too. Part wrote an OS for PDP-11, and worked on the compiler
for it.
Currently restoring a non-DEC PDP-11 OS from partial sources.
Based upon the simple real-time exec to which I was introduced in 1974,
(Automation division of Westinghouse Brake & Signal, paper tape plus
teletype console PDP11 to control part of the National Grid at
Walpole St Andrew substation), when the world of microprocessors
was emerging, in order to understand the order code (instruction
set to the Yanks) of each new micro, I hand coded a 256 byte version
of that exec.

Obviously in that size, a static build, with no provision for
loading other tasks on the fly.
Chris
2020-09-07 16:47:47 UTC
Permalink
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Have a look at FreeBSD. Less bloated than Linux, no
systemd, installs in less than an hour and is rock
solid. The only downside is that you have to install
the gui of choice, but they are all available as
packages, taking 10 mins or so to install. Just about
all Linux packages are available as well.

Still running 12 on X86 and 11 on Sparc, but 13 is
the current version, fwir...

Chris
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
2020-09-07 17:02:48 UTC
Permalink
On Mon, 07 Sep 2020 17:47:47 +0100
Post by Chris
Still running 12 on X86 and 11 on Sparc, but 13 is
the current version, fwir...
12.1 and 11.4 are the current releases, 13 is the up and coming
release under development.
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/
Bob Eager
2020-09-07 20:57:38 UTC
Permalink
Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
Still running 12 on X86 and 11 on Sparc, but 13 is the current version,
fwir...
12.1 and 11.4 are the current releases, 13 is the up and coming
release under development.
Yup. Currently running the house on 12.1 (as well as the jitsi server on
EC2).

Testing ports on 13-CURRENT.
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Dan Espen
2020-09-07 17:44:40 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Have a look at FreeBSD. Less bloated than Linux, no
systemd, installs in less than an hour and is rock
solid. The only downside is that you have to install
the gui of choice, but they are all available as
packages, taking 10 mins or so to install. Just about
all Linux packages are available as well.
Still running 12 on X86 and 11 on Sparc, but 13 is
the current version, fwir...
Oops, war starting.

What does Google say:

Is FreeBSD better than Linux?
Both are stable and provide an efficient working environment. However,
the general consensus is that nearly all applications run faster on
Linux than FreeBSD, but FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack has way less latency
(faster response time) than Linux.Jun 27, 2018

When someone tells you their OS is better because it doesn't have
systemd, well, hate to say this, but they're uninformed.

I'll take systemd over SysV init every day.
BSDs init looks to me like more of the same.

systemd took a total mess and transformed it into a logical well
designed structure. Basic system design principles will tell you
this. Systemd took a mess of inconsistent start up scripts and a nest
of soft links and turned it into a very simple structure where ONE
file describes each service to be managed. It did all this and managed
to:

1. Reduce boot time dramatically
2. Reduce shut down time the same way
3. Manage running services in case a device is plugged in or has a
problem and needs to restart
4. Finally make the relationships between running services clear
--
Dan Espen
Chris
2020-09-07 23:05:36 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Have a look at FreeBSD. Less bloated than Linux, no
systemd, installs in less than an hour and is rock
solid. The only downside is that you have to install
the gui of choice, but they are all available as
packages, taking 10 mins or so to install. Just about
all Linux packages are available as well.
Still running 12 on X86 and 11 on Sparc, but 13 is
the current version, fwir...
Oops, war starting.
Is FreeBSD better than Linux?
Both are stable and provide an efficient working environment. However,
the general consensus is that nearly all applications run faster on
Linux than FreeBSD, but FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack has way less latency
(faster response time) than Linux.Jun 27, 2018
When someone tells you their OS is better because it doesn't have
systemd, well, hate to say this, but they're uninformed.
I'll take systemd over SysV init every day.
BSDs init looks to me like more of the same.
systemd took a total mess and transformed it into a logical well
designed structure. Basic system design principles will tell you
this. Systemd took a mess of inconsistent start up scripts and a nest
of soft links and turned it into a very simple structure where ONE
file describes each service to be managed. It did all this and managed
1. Reduce boot time dramatically
2. Reduce shut down time the same way
3. Manage running services in case a device is plugged in or has a
problem and needs to restart
4. Finally make the relationships between running services clear
Won't get involved in wars, as I do use both and both work, though
all Linux here is pre systemd, or devuan.
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.

If you want an example of how to do a higher level system management,
look at Solaris, which kept most of the original log files and
locations, but introduced an xml layer above all that, which you
can bypass if you need to. How would you do that for log and config
files with systemd ?. Might help brain dead sysadmins, but opaque
if you need to do serious work under the hood. It's got it's fingers
into every part of the system and is totaly against any concept of
functional isolation, partioning and layered design.

As to the list, 1, 4 ?, who cares if boot and shutdown take a bit
longer, it's not a race, 3) Solaris and FreeBSD both both have had
service management utilities for years. 4) That's if the sysadmin
has the internal knowledge, but that's true for both os's.

\rant :-)...

Chris


I view Linux as a wondoze substitute these day, but ymmv...
management utilities
.
Dan Espen
2020-09-07 23:40:54 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Have a look at FreeBSD. Less bloated than Linux, no
systemd, installs in less than an hour and is rock
solid. The only downside is that you have to install
the gui of choice, but they are all available as
packages, taking 10 mins or so to install. Just about
all Linux packages are available as well.
Still running 12 on X86 and 11 on Sparc, but 13 is
the current version, fwir...
Oops, war starting.
Is FreeBSD better than Linux?
Both are stable and provide an efficient working environment. However,
the general consensus is that nearly all applications run faster on
Linux than FreeBSD, but FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack has way less latency
(faster response time) than Linux.Jun 27, 2018
When someone tells you their OS is better because it doesn't have
systemd, well, hate to say this, but they're uninformed.
I'll take systemd over SysV init every day.
BSDs init looks to me like more of the same.
systemd took a total mess and transformed it into a logical well
designed structure. Basic system design principles will tell you
this. Systemd took a mess of inconsistent start up scripts and a nest
of soft links and turned it into a very simple structure where ONE
file describes each service to be managed. It did all this and managed
1. Reduce boot time dramatically
2. Reduce shut down time the same way
3. Manage running services in case a device is plugged in or has a
problem and needs to restart
4. Finally make the relationships between running services clear
Won't get involved in wars, as I do use both and both work, though
all Linux here is pre systemd, or devuan.
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
Not sure why zfs is a big winner:

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,

I was just reading about Fedora's new file system, XFS.
I'm not facing any issues with ext4 though.

For Fedora, I didn't like or need LVM so I turned it off.
I wanted /home on a physically separate volume not a virtual volume.
Post by Chris
If you want an example of how to do a higher level system management,
look at Solaris, which kept most of the original log files and
locations, but introduced an xml layer above all that, which you
can bypass if you need to. How would you do that for log and config
files with systemd ?.
I must be misunderstanding something, my Fedora system has all the
traditional logs in addition to the journal. Of course that is a
distinct issue from the init system.

At work all of the init stuff on my Solaris systems was read protected
by the admins so I couldn't see what it was doing, but I was under
the impression it was similar to systemd. Fortunately systemd uses
simple flat files instead of xml.
Post by Chris
Might help brain dead sysadmins, but opaque
if you need to do serious work under the hood. It's got it's fingers
into every part of the system and is totaly against any concept of
functional isolation, partioning and layered design.
I don't know what part of systemd you are talking about.
The init system part (which is the real systemd) just replaces
all those init scripts and the forest of soft links. It replaces all
that with just one .service file for each service.

Couldn't be simpler.

Here is the .service file for Emacs:

home> cat /usr/lib/systemd/user/emacs.service
[Unit]
Description=Emacs: the extensible, self-documenting text editor

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon
ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Look at the beauty of that simple design.
How to start it, how to stop it, what to call it, what to do if it fails.
It couldn't be any simpler.
Post by Chris
As to the list, 1, 4 ?, who cares if boot and shutdown take a bit
longer, it's not a race, 3) Solaris and FreeBSD both both have had
service management utilities for years. 4) That's if the sysadmin
has the internal knowledge, but that's true for both os's.
Well systemd has it's undeniable good points so invariably it's
detractors come up with "who cares".

I was trouble shooting a problem that needed 5 or 6 reboots just today.
I care.
Post by Chris
I view Linux as a wondoze substitute these day, but ymmv...
There you go. It's just like Windows!

Absurd.
--
Dan Espen
Chris
2020-09-08 00:33:52 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Have a look at FreeBSD. Less bloated than Linux, no
systemd, installs in less than an hour and is rock
solid. The only downside is that you have to install
the gui of choice, but they are all available as
packages, taking 10 mins or so to install. Just about
all Linux packages are available as well.
Still running 12 on X86 and 11 on Sparc, but 13 is
the current version, fwir...
Oops, war starting.
Is FreeBSD better than Linux?
Both are stable and provide an efficient working environment. However,
the general consensus is that nearly all applications run faster on
Linux than FreeBSD, but FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack has way less latency
(faster response time) than Linux.Jun 27, 2018
When someone tells you their OS is better because it doesn't have
systemd, well, hate to say this, but they're uninformed.
I'll take systemd over SysV init every day.
BSDs init looks to me like more of the same.
systemd took a total mess and transformed it into a logical well
designed structure. Basic system design principles will tell you
this. Systemd took a mess of inconsistent start up scripts and a nest
of soft links and turned it into a very simple structure where ONE
file describes each service to be managed. It did all this and managed
1. Reduce boot time dramatically
2. Reduce shut down time the same way
3. Manage running services in case a device is plugged in or has a
problem and needs to restart
4. Finally make the relationships between running services clear
Won't get involved in wars, as I do use both and both work, though
all Linux here is pre systemd, or devuan.
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
I was just reading about Fedora's new file system, XFS.
I'm not facing any issues with ext4 though.
For Fedora, I didn't like or need LVM so I turned it off.
I wanted /home on a physically separate volume not a virtual volume.
Post by Chris
If you want an example of how to do a higher level system management,
look at Solaris, which kept most of the original log files and
locations, but introduced an xml layer above all that, which you
can bypass if you need to. How would you do that for log and config
files with systemd ?.
I must be misunderstanding something, my Fedora system has all the
traditional logs in addition to the journal. Of course that is a
distinct issue from the init system.
At work all of the init stuff on my Solaris systems was read protected
by the admins so I couldn't see what it was doing, but I was under
the impression it was similar to systemd. Fortunately systemd uses
simple flat files instead of xml.
Post by Chris
Might help brain dead sysadmins, but opaque
if you need to do serious work under the hood. It's got it's fingers
into every part of the system and is totaly against any concept of
functional isolation, partioning and layered design.
I don't know what part of systemd you are talking about.
The init system part (which is the real systemd) just replaces
all those init scripts and the forest of soft links. It replaces all
that with just one .service file for each service.
Couldn't be simpler.
home> cat /usr/lib/systemd/user/emacs.service
[Unit]
Description=Emacs: the extensible, self-documenting text editor
[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon
ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
Look at the beauty of that simple design.
How to start it, how to stop it, what to call it, what to do if it fails.
It couldn't be any simpler.
Post by Chris
As to the list, 1, 4 ?, who cares if boot and shutdown take a bit
longer, it's not a race, 3) Solaris and FreeBSD both both have had
service management utilities for years. 4) That's if the sysadmin
has the internal knowledge, but that's true for both os's.
Well systemd has it's undeniable good points so invariably it's
detractors come up with "who cares".
I was trouble shooting a problem that needed 5 or 6 reboots just today.
I care.
Post by Chris
I view Linux as a wondoze substitute these day, but ymmv...
There you go. It's just like Windows!
Absurd.
I use older versions of Suse, but the last time I had a look at a
later version, it had animations, bouncy bouncy and more dross,
pages and pages full of running processes, no idea what they all
did, Windows wannabe incarnate, but no use to me. The problem with
systemd is that it has it's fingers into so many things, Linux
is becoming psychotic, not really knowing what is really running
the show, the kernel, or systemd. Apparently gnome won't run now
without it, and more, so how is that an init replacement only ?.

Whatever, but there is just one primary config file for FreeBSD, where
services can be enabled, drivers loaded and much more. It really isn't
much effort to learn how to do that and there are service management
utilites as well. Typically, just a couple of pages of processes running
with xfce4, less with no gui. Tight design and engineering
efficiency at work. So why do I need systemd ?. Convince me :-)...

Chris
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 02:39:05 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Have a look at FreeBSD. Less bloated than Linux, no
systemd, installs in less than an hour and is rock
solid. The only downside is that you have to install
the gui of choice, but they are all available as
packages, taking 10 mins or so to install. Just about
all Linux packages are available as well.
Still running 12 on X86 and 11 on Sparc, but 13 is
the current version, fwir...
Oops, war starting.
Is FreeBSD better than Linux?
Both are stable and provide an efficient working environment. However,
the general consensus is that nearly all applications run faster on
Linux than FreeBSD, but FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack has way less latency
(faster response time) than Linux.Jun 27, 2018
When someone tells you their OS is better because it doesn't have
systemd, well, hate to say this, but they're uninformed.
I'll take systemd over SysV init every day.
BSDs init looks to me like more of the same.
systemd took a total mess and transformed it into a logical well
designed structure. Basic system design principles will tell you
this. Systemd took a mess of inconsistent start up scripts and a nest
of soft links and turned it into a very simple structure where ONE
file describes each service to be managed. It did all this and managed
1. Reduce boot time dramatically
2. Reduce shut down time the same way
3. Manage running services in case a device is plugged in or has a
problem and needs to restart
4. Finally make the relationships between running services clear
Won't get involved in wars, as I do use both and both work, though
all Linux here is pre systemd, or devuan.
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
I was just reading about Fedora's new file system, XFS.
I'm not facing any issues with ext4 though.
For Fedora, I didn't like or need LVM so I turned it off.
I wanted /home on a physically separate volume not a virtual volume.
Post by Chris
If you want an example of how to do a higher level system management,
look at Solaris, which kept most of the original log files and
locations, but introduced an xml layer above all that, which you
can bypass if you need to. How would you do that for log and config
files with systemd ?.
I must be misunderstanding something, my Fedora system has all the
traditional logs in addition to the journal. Of course that is a
distinct issue from the init system.
At work all of the init stuff on my Solaris systems was read protected
by the admins so I couldn't see what it was doing, but I was under
the impression it was similar to systemd. Fortunately systemd uses
simple flat files instead of xml.
Post by Chris
Might help brain dead sysadmins, but opaque
if you need to do serious work under the hood. It's got it's fingers
into every part of the system and is totaly against any concept of
functional isolation, partioning and layered design.
I don't know what part of systemd you are talking about.
The init system part (which is the real systemd) just replaces
all those init scripts and the forest of soft links. It replaces all
that with just one .service file for each service.
Couldn't be simpler.
home> cat /usr/lib/systemd/user/emacs.service
[Unit]
Description=Emacs: the extensible, self-documenting text editor
[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon
ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
Look at the beauty of that simple design.
How to start it, how to stop it, what to call it, what to do if it fails.
It couldn't be any simpler.
Post by Chris
As to the list, 1, 4 ?, who cares if boot and shutdown take a bit
longer, it's not a race, 3) Solaris and FreeBSD both both have had
service management utilities for years. 4) That's if the sysadmin
has the internal knowledge, but that's true for both os's.
Well systemd has it's undeniable good points so invariably it's
detractors come up with "who cares".
I was trouble shooting a problem that needed 5 or 6 reboots just today.
I care.
Post by Chris
I view Linux as a wondoze substitute these day, but ymmv...
There you go. It's just like Windows!
Absurd.
I use older versions of Suse, but the last time I had a look at a
later version, it had animations, bouncy bouncy and more dross,
pages and pages full of running processes, no idea what they all
did, Windows wannabe incarnate, but no use to me.
To get rid of all that use a window manager. I install new releases
all the time. Nothing visible changes unless I want it to.
Post by Chris
The problem with
systemd is that it has it's fingers into so many things,
Actually no. The systemd project has spread out into many areas.
That's just a sign of how productive the systemd team is.

I consider that a separate issue from systemd the replacement from init.

And I can't see how it's a problem if one team keeps looking at
Linux thinking what should we improve next. So, to clarify,
it's not systemd that has it's fingers in so many things, it's the
systemd team.
Post by Chris
Linux
is becoming psychotic, not really knowing what is really running
the show, the kernel, or systemd.
systemd starts all the services. The kernel still does what it's
supposed to do. I don't see a problem.
Post by Chris
Apparently gnome won't run now
without it, and more, so how is that an init replacement only ?.
Gnome is full of utilities that start/stop/customize services.
How do you suppose they do that without being dependent on
the .service files?
Post by Chris
Whatever, but there is just one primary config file for FreeBSD, where
services can be enabled, drivers loaded and much more. It really isn't
much effort to learn how to do that and there are service management
utilites as well. Typically, just a couple of pages of processes
running with xfce4, less with no gui. Tight design and engineering
efficiency at work. So why do I need systemd ?. Convince me :-)...
One config file for hundreds of possible services?
I don't think so. Like I said, I don't know BSD init but I'm pretty
sure it has a script to start/stop each individual service. That's
hundreds of possible scripts. If they are like SysV init, you can't
tell externally what they do. They have to support stop and start,
do they support restart, reload? Where is the descriptive name of the service?

Take a look at this:

h> systemctl status acpid
acpid.service - ACPI Event Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/acpid.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-09-07 12:45:21 EDT; 9h ago
TriggeredBy: acpid.socket
Docs: man:acpid(8)
Main PID: 1023 (acpid)
Tasks: 1 (limit: 2306)
Memory: 248.0K
CPU: 6.613s
CGroup: /system.slice/acpid.service
/usr/sbin/acpid -f
Sep 07 12:45:21 home.home systemd[1]: Started ACPI Event Daemon.
--
Dan Espen
Bob Eager
2020-09-08 11:01:01 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
One config file for hundreds of possible services?
No, one to say which services are enabled. And options if required.
Post by Dan Espen
I don't think so. Like I said, I don't know BSD init but I'm pretty
sure it has a script to start/stop each individual service. That's
hundreds of possible scripts. If they are like SysV init, you can't
tell externally what they do. They have to support stop and start,
do they support restart, reload? Where is the descriptive name of the service?
service <servcename> describe.

The scripts are all structured the same, and the commands are documented
at the top.
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Chris
2020-09-08 13:42:18 UTC
Permalink
<snipped)
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I use older versions of Suse, but the last time I had a look at a
later version, it had animations, bouncy bouncy and more dross,
pages and pages full of running processes, no idea what they all
did, Windows wannabe incarnate, but no use to me.
To get rid of all that use a window manager. I install new releases
all the time. Nothing visible changes unless I want it to.
I must be missing something, as if you are running a gui,with all the
bouncy castle stuff, then you have a window manager running. As for
updates, rarely do it. Once a system is the way I want it, it's locked
down unless there are good reasons to change it. Constant updates
are a windoze "feature", but that just illustrates how bad it
really is, with so many bugs as shipped. The update idea is like
insurance, selling fear and paranoia.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
The problem with
systemd is that it has it's fingers into so many things,
Actually no. The systemd project has spread out into many areas.
That's just a sign of how productive the systemd team is.
You are trolling, right ? :-).

I guess you can paint a t**d any colour you like, but it still
stinks underneath.
Post by Dan Espen
I consider that a separate issue from systemd the replacement from init.
I thought that was the whole point of systemd, an init replacement,
but obviously misjudged it. If true, systemd has visions of empire,
running the whole show instead of the kernel. Thought from the
start that the systemd project was a power grab by Red Hat and all
part of the strategy to exert ever more control over the direction
of Linux as an open source project. In some ways, that's
understandable, since they fund a lot of development, but there's a
fine balance between the idealism and creativity of open source and
the hard edged businesses which companies like Red Hat are.
Post by Dan Espen
And I can't see how it's a problem if one team keeps looking at
Linux thinking what should we improve next. So, to clarify,
it's not systemd that has it's fingers in so many things, it's the
systemd team.
If it ain't broke, dont fix it, though I guess they have to justify
their existence and salaries. With that attitude, no wonder mainstream
Linux looks more and more like a Camel. Change for change's sake
rarely has a good outcome.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Linux
is becoming psychotic, not really knowing what is really running
the show, the kernel, or systemd.
systemd starts all the services. The kernel still does what it's
supposed to do. I don't see a problem.
Post by Chris
Apparently gnome won't run now
without it, and more, so how is that an init replacement only ?.
Gnome is full of utilities that start/stop/customize services.
How do you suppose they do that without being dependent on
the .service files?.
That doesn't address the the comment. Deflection ?.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Whatever, but there is just one primary config file for FreeBSD, where
services can be enabled, drivers loaded and much more. It really isn't
much effort to learn how to do that and there are service management
utilites as well. Typically, just a couple of pages of processes
running with xfce4, less with no gui. Tight design and engineering
efficiency at work. So why do I need systemd ?. Convince me :-)...
One config file for hundreds of possible services?
I don't think so. Like I said, I don't know BSD init but I'm pretty
sure it has a script to start/stop each individual service. That's
hundreds of possible scripts. If they are like SysV init, you can't
tell externally what they do. They have to support stop and start,
do they support restart, reload? Where is the descriptive name of the service?
Sure, thee are config scripts for the various services, but for a
typical system, rarely any need to even look at them. They can be
controlled, start, stop restart etc, from the command line or from
elsewhere, such as the rc.conf file. On solaris, there are the svcs
and svcadm utilities and on FreeBSD, the service utility. I keep
mentioning Solaris, but have used it for decades and FreeBSD is a nod in
that direction, with ZFS, light weight virtualisation ideas
seemingly borrowed from it.
Post by Dan Espen
h> systemctl status acpid
acpid.service - ACPI Event Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/acpid.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-09-07 12:45:21 EDT; 9h ago
TriggeredBy: acpid.socket
Docs: man:acpid(8)
Main PID: 1023 (acpid)
Tasks: 1 (limit: 2306)
Memory: 248.0K
CPU: 6.613s
CGroup: /system.slice/acpid.service
/usr/sbin/acpid -f
Sep 07 12:45:21 home.home systemd[1]: Started ACPI Event Daemon.
FreeBSD has equivalent management tools. For example, ps -dx
gives a tree structured text listing of the processes on the
system and their hierarchy.The service command will
list services and information, as well as start stop,
restart etc. The top command gives a load of info on running
processes, memory usage, priority and current state, but that's
on most unix systems. Perhaps systemd will do that and more,
but why ?.

A quick test here, xfce4 + couple of terminal windows running,
around 75 processes loaded. Now try that with linux and gnome 3.
Do you want a lean and clean street racer,. or a sclerotic mess ?.

Anyway, you have already said you know nothing about it, so
why not broaden your horizons and give it a test install ?.
Less than an hour of your time, or is a text only install and
package config too difficult ?. Plenty of how to tutorials on
the web if you get stuck...

Chris
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 14:28:35 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
<snipped)
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I use older versions of Suse, but the last time I had a look at a
later version, it had animations, bouncy bouncy and more dross,
pages and pages full of running processes, no idea what they all
did, Windows wannabe incarnate, but no use to me.
To get rid of all that use a window manager. I install new releases
all the time. Nothing visible changes unless I want it to.
I must be missing something, as if you are running a gui,with all the
bouncy castle stuff, then you have a window manager running.
I guess I wasn't clear.

The window managers packaged as a 'desktop' tend to be the ones that
change all the time and bounce around.

If you pick one of the more traditional window managers nothing
will bounce around or change without you wanting it to.

My main experience is with Fvwm. Maybe other window managers are
different. Another poster mentioned a twm variant. Very stable,
no bouncing.
Post by Chris
As for updates, rarely do it. Once a system is the way I want it, it's locked
down unless there are good reasons to change it. Constant updates
are a windoze "feature", but that just illustrates how bad it
really is, with so many bugs as shipped. The update idea is like
insurance, selling fear and paranoia.
I like to apply updates to get the latest versions of the software
I'm using. Stability has it's benefits but it's hard to follow
a Gimp tutorial when you're not running the version the tutorial
addresses.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
The problem with
systemd is that it has it's fingers into so many things,
Actually no. The systemd project has spread out into many areas.
That's just a sign of how productive the systemd team is.
You are trolling, right ? :-).
I guess you can paint a t**d any colour you like, but it still
stinks underneath.
Ridiculous.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
I consider that a separate issue from systemd the replacement from init.
I thought that was the whole point of systemd, an init replacement,
but obviously misjudged it. If true, systemd has visions of empire,
running the whole show instead of the kernel. Thought from the
start that the systemd project was a power grab by Red Hat and all
part of the strategy to exert ever more control over the direction
of Linux as an open source project. In some ways, that's
understandable, since they fund a lot of development, but there's a
fine balance between the idealism and creativity of open source and
the hard edged businesses which companies like Red Hat are.
More ridiculous. The kernel still does what it needs to do.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
And I can't see how it's a problem if one team keeps looking at
Linux thinking what should we improve next. So, to clarify,
it's not systemd that has it's fingers in so many things, it's the
systemd team.
If it ain't broke, dont fix it, though I guess they have to justify
their existence and salaries. With that attitude, no wonder mainstream
Linux looks more and more like a Camel. Change for change's sake
rarely has a good outcome.
I guess your corollary is if it can be improved leave it alone.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Linux
is becoming psychotic, not really knowing what is really running
the show, the kernel, or systemd.
systemd starts all the services. The kernel still does what it's
supposed to do. I don't see a problem.
Post by Chris
Apparently gnome won't run now
without it, and more, so how is that an init replacement only ?.
Gnome is full of utilities that start/stop/customize services.
How do you suppose they do that without being dependent on
the .service files?.
That doesn't address the the comment. Deflection ?.
What comment? The kernel vs. systemd comment?
The kernel does what it does, systemd hasn't changed that.
What "show" are you thinking about?
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Whatever, but there is just one primary config file for FreeBSD, where
services can be enabled, drivers loaded and much more. It really isn't
much effort to learn how to do that and there are service management
utilites as well. Typically, just a couple of pages of processes
running with xfce4, less with no gui. Tight design and engineering
efficiency at work. So why do I need systemd ?. Convince me :-)...
One config file for hundreds of possible services?
I don't think so. Like I said, I don't know BSD init but I'm pretty
sure it has a script to start/stop each individual service. That's
hundreds of possible scripts. If they are like SysV init, you can't
tell externally what they do. They have to support stop and start,
do they support restart, reload? Where is the descriptive name of the service?
Sure, thee are config scripts for the various services, but for a
typical system, rarely any need to even look at them. They can be
controlled, start, stop restart etc, from the command line or from
elsewhere, such as the rc.conf file. On solaris, there are the svcs
and svcadm utilities and on FreeBSD, the service utility. I keep
mentioning Solaris, but have used it for decades and FreeBSD is a nod
in that direction, with ZFS, light weight virtualisation ideas
seemingly borrowed from it.
Deflection?

What does ZFS have to do with systemd?
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
h> systemctl status acpid
acpid.service - ACPI Event Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/acpid.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-09-07 12:45:21 EDT; 9h ago
TriggeredBy: acpid.socket
Docs: man:acpid(8)
Main PID: 1023 (acpid)
Tasks: 1 (limit: 2306)
Memory: 248.0K
CPU: 6.613s
CGroup: /system.slice/acpid.service
/usr/sbin/acpid -f
Sep 07 12:45:21 home.home systemd[1]: Started ACPI Event Daemon.
FreeBSD has equivalent management tools. For example, ps -dx
gives a tree structured text listing of the processes on the
system and their hierarchy.The service command will
list services and information, as well as start stop,
restart etc. The top command gives a load of info on running
processes, memory usage, priority and current state, but that's
on most unix systems. Perhaps systemd will do that and more,
but why ?.
So with systemd you get one integrated display of a services status
along with a description of what it does. Linux has all the
tools you mention. Why does systemd tell you all it does?
Because you asked about the services status. It gives you
a complete answer. Is your claim that it's better to have to hunt
around for all that information?
Post by Chris
A quick test here, xfce4 + couple of terminal windows running,
around 75 processes loaded. Now try that with linux and gnome 3.
Do you want a lean and clean street racer,. or a sclerotic mess ?.
I fail to see the significance of your comment about xfce vs. Gnome.
Both work fine with systemd.
Post by Chris
Anyway, you have already said you know nothing about it, so
why not broaden your horizons and give it a test install ?.
Less than an hour of your time, or is a text only install and
package config too difficult ?. Plenty of how to tutorials on
the web if you get stuck...
Is it too difficult?
Are you trying to insult me?

Right now my system is doing everything I need.
So far I haven't seen anything mentioned that would qualify
as an improvement.

I guess I just don't have the "systemd is evil" disease.
--
Dan Espen
Peter Flass
2020-09-08 15:44:51 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
<snipped)
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I use older versions of Suse, but the last time I had a look at a
later version, it had animations, bouncy bouncy and more dross,
pages and pages full of running processes, no idea what they all
did, Windows wannabe incarnate, but no use to me.
To get rid of all that use a window manager. I install new releases
all the time. Nothing visible changes unless I want it to.
I must be missing something, as if you are running a gui,with all the
bouncy castle stuff, then you have a window manager running.
I guess I wasn't clear.
The window managers packaged as a 'desktop' tend to be the ones that
change all the time and bounce around.
If you pick one of the more traditional window managers nothing
will bounce around or change without you wanting it to.
My main experience is with Fvwm. Maybe other window managers are
different. Another poster mentioned a twm variant. Very stable,
no bouncing.
Post by Chris
As for updates, rarely do it. Once a system is the way I want it, it's locked
down unless there are good reasons to change it. Constant updates
are a windoze "feature", but that just illustrates how bad it
really is, with so many bugs as shipped. The update idea is like
insurance, selling fear and paranoia.
I like to apply updates to get the latest versions of the software
I'm using.
This was another problem I ran into. I was running a non-LTS version of
Ubuntu and was finally pushed to upgrade for some reason. and discovered
there was no upgrade from my release to anywhere; I had to reinstall.
--
Pete
Chris
2020-09-08 15:48:20 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
<snipped)
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I use older versions of Suse, but the last time I had a look at a
later version, it had animations, bouncy bouncy and more dross,
pages and pages full of running processes, no idea what they all
did, Windows wannabe incarnate, but no use to me.
To get rid of all that use a window manager. I install new releases
all the time. Nothing visible changes unless I want it to.
I must be missing something, as if you are running a gui,with all the
bouncy castle stuff, then you have a window manager running.
I guess I wasn't clear.
The window managers packaged as a 'desktop' tend to be the ones that
change all the time and bounce around.
If you pick one of the more traditional window managers nothing
will bounce around or change without you wanting it to.
My main experience is with Fvwm. Maybe other window managers are
different. Another poster mentioned a twm variant. Very stable,
no bouncing.
Post by Chris
As for updates, rarely do it. Once a system is the way I want it, it's locked
down unless there are good reasons to change it. Constant updates
are a windoze "feature", but that just illustrates how bad it
really is, with so many bugs as shipped. The update idea is like
insurance, selling fear and paranoia.
I like to apply updates to get the latest versions of the software
I'm using. Stability has it's benefits but it's hard to follow
a Gimp tutorial when you're not running the version the tutorial
addresses.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
The problem with
systemd is that it has it's fingers into so many things,
Actually no. The systemd project has spread out into many areas.
That's just a sign of how productive the systemd team is.
You are trolling, right ? :-).
I guess you can paint a t**d any colour you like, but it still
stinks underneath.
Ridiculous.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
I consider that a separate issue from systemd the replacement from init.
I thought that was the whole point of systemd, an init replacement,
but obviously misjudged it. If true, systemd has visions of empire,
running the whole show instead of the kernel. Thought from the
start that the systemd project was a power grab by Red Hat and all
part of the strategy to exert ever more control over the direction
of Linux as an open source project. In some ways, that's
understandable, since they fund a lot of development, but there's a
fine balance between the idealism and creativity of open source and
the hard edged businesses which companies like Red Hat are.
More ridiculous. The kernel still does what it needs to do.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
And I can't see how it's a problem if one team keeps looking at
Linux thinking what should we improve next. So, to clarify,
it's not systemd that has it's fingers in so many things, it's the
systemd team.
If it ain't broke, dont fix it, though I guess they have to justify
their existence and salaries. With that attitude, no wonder mainstream
Linux looks more and more like a Camel. Change for change's sake
rarely has a good outcome.
I guess your corollary is if it can be improved leave it alone.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Linux
is becoming psychotic, not really knowing what is really running
the show, the kernel, or systemd.
systemd starts all the services. The kernel still does what it's
supposed to do. I don't see a problem.
Post by Chris
Apparently gnome won't run now
without it, and more, so how is that an init replacement only ?.
Gnome is full of utilities that start/stop/customize services.
How do you suppose they do that without being dependent on
the .service files?.
That doesn't address the the comment. Deflection ?.
What comment? The kernel vs. systemd comment?
The kernel does what it does, systemd hasn't changed that.
What "show" are you thinking about?
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Whatever, but there is just one primary config file for FreeBSD, where
services can be enabled, drivers loaded and much more. It really isn't
much effort to learn how to do that and there are service management
utilites as well. Typically, just a couple of pages of processes
running with xfce4, less with no gui. Tight design and engineering
efficiency at work. So why do I need systemd ?. Convince me :-)...
One config file for hundreds of possible services?
I don't think so. Like I said, I don't know BSD init but I'm pretty
sure it has a script to start/stop each individual service. That's
hundreds of possible scripts. If they are like SysV init, you can't
tell externally what they do. They have to support stop and start,
do they support restart, reload? Where is the descriptive name of the service?
Sure, thee are config scripts for the various services, but for a
typical system, rarely any need to even look at them. They can be
controlled, start, stop restart etc, from the command line or from
elsewhere, such as the rc.conf file. On solaris, there are the svcs
and svcadm utilities and on FreeBSD, the service utility. I keep
mentioning Solaris, but have used it for decades and FreeBSD is a nod
in that direction, with ZFS, light weight virtualisation ideas
seemingly borrowed from it.
Deflection?
What does ZFS have to do with systemd?
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
h> systemctl status acpid
acpid.service - ACPI Event Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/acpid.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-09-07 12:45:21 EDT; 9h ago
TriggeredBy: acpid.socket
Docs: man:acpid(8)
Main PID: 1023 (acpid)
Tasks: 1 (limit: 2306)
Memory: 248.0K
CPU: 6.613s
CGroup: /system.slice/acpid.service
/usr/sbin/acpid -f
Sep 07 12:45:21 home.home systemd[1]: Started ACPI Event Daemon.
FreeBSD has equivalent management tools. For example, ps -dx
gives a tree structured text listing of the processes on the
system and their hierarchy.The service command will
list services and information, as well as start stop,
restart etc. The top command gives a load of info on running
processes, memory usage, priority and current state, but that's
on most unix systems. Perhaps systemd will do that and more,
but why ?.
So with systemd you get one integrated display of a services status
along with a description of what it does. Linux has all the
tools you mention. Why does systemd tell you all it does?
Because you asked about the services status. It gives you
a complete answer. Is your claim that it's better to have to hunt
around for all that information?
Post by Chris
A quick test here, xfce4 + couple of terminal windows running,
around 75 processes loaded. Now try that with linux and gnome 3.
Do you want a lean and clean street racer,. or a sclerotic mess ?.
I fail to see the significance of your comment about xfce vs. Gnome.
Both work fine with systemd.
Post by Chris
Anyway, you have already said you know nothing about it, so
why not broaden your horizons and give it a test install ?.
Less than an hour of your time, or is a text only install and
package config too difficult ?. Plenty of how to tutorials on
the web if you get stuck...
Is it too difficult?
Are you trying to insult me?
Right now my system is doing everything I need.
So far I haven't seen anything mentioned that would qualify
as an improvement.
I guess I just don't have the "systemd is evil" disease.
While any fool can write a 2 page utility in C, big system
design only succeeds if ideas proven over decades are
followed. This includes ideas such as partitioning, where
the various subsystems are encapsulated and have a defined
call interface for the internal functions. The only
access to the internal functions are through the call
interface and the user needs to know nothing about the
internal code to use the capabilities. So long as the
call interface and functions remain the same, the internal
code can be modified or even completely rewritten with no
effect on the dependent calling services elsewhere.

From what I understand, systemd needs to have
extensive knowledge of all the subsystems it interacts
with, which creates a dependency minefield, already
a serious enough problem for Linux and yes, FreeBSD and
open source in general. It just adds complexity where
there is no need for it and the whole idea is just bad
software engineering. While vertical dependencies are
often unavoidable, horizontal ditto goes against every
tenet of good software engineering and very much against
the unix philosophy that made it so successful.

I mean, why should gnome, a gui, be dependent on systemd ?.
Then we have the log file problem, which are in binary
format. So how do I deal with that after a system crash ?
Normally, I would boot the distro, mount root and look at
the the text log files, simple, but just another layer
of complexity for it's own sake.

I do embedded hardware and s/w dev here and still
just scratching the surface of the os's in use even after
decades of use, but have bought the books to get some
insight into the internals. After decades, much of the
appraisal of new ideas can be a bit instinctive, but my
guess is that systemd will not survive long term and be
replaced by a something else that does the job properly
and without all the disruption. It's all incremental,
learn from mistakes, do it better next time...

Chris
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 16:12:27 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
<snipped)
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I use older versions of Suse, but the last time I had a look at a
later version, it had animations, bouncy bouncy and more dross,
pages and pages full of running processes, no idea what they all
did, Windows wannabe incarnate, but no use to me.
To get rid of all that use a window manager. I install new releases
all the time. Nothing visible changes unless I want it to.
I must be missing something, as if you are running a gui,with all the
bouncy castle stuff, then you have a window manager running.
I guess I wasn't clear.
The window managers packaged as a 'desktop' tend to be the ones that
change all the time and bounce around.
If you pick one of the more traditional window managers nothing
will bounce around or change without you wanting it to.
My main experience is with Fvwm. Maybe other window managers are
different. Another poster mentioned a twm variant. Very stable,
no bouncing.
Post by Chris
As for updates, rarely do it. Once a system is the way I want it, it's locked
down unless there are good reasons to change it. Constant updates
are a windoze "feature", but that just illustrates how bad it
really is, with so many bugs as shipped. The update idea is like
insurance, selling fear and paranoia.
I like to apply updates to get the latest versions of the software
I'm using. Stability has it's benefits but it's hard to follow
a Gimp tutorial when you're not running the version the tutorial
addresses.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
The problem with
systemd is that it has it's fingers into so many things,
Actually no. The systemd project has spread out into many areas.
That's just a sign of how productive the systemd team is.
You are trolling, right ? :-).
I guess you can paint a t**d any colour you like, but it still
stinks underneath.
Ridiculous.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
I consider that a separate issue from systemd the replacement from init.
I thought that was the whole point of systemd, an init replacement,
but obviously misjudged it. If true, systemd has visions of empire,
running the whole show instead of the kernel. Thought from the
start that the systemd project was a power grab by Red Hat and all
part of the strategy to exert ever more control over the direction
of Linux as an open source project. In some ways, that's
understandable, since they fund a lot of development, but there's a
fine balance between the idealism and creativity of open source and
the hard edged businesses which companies like Red Hat are.
More ridiculous. The kernel still does what it needs to do.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
And I can't see how it's a problem if one team keeps looking at
Linux thinking what should we improve next. So, to clarify,
it's not systemd that has it's fingers in so many things, it's the
systemd team.
If it ain't broke, dont fix it, though I guess they have to justify
their existence and salaries. With that attitude, no wonder mainstream
Linux looks more and more like a Camel. Change for change's sake
rarely has a good outcome.
I guess your corollary is if it can be improved leave it alone.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Linux
is becoming psychotic, not really knowing what is really running
the show, the kernel, or systemd.
systemd starts all the services. The kernel still does what it's
supposed to do. I don't see a problem.
Post by Chris
Apparently gnome won't run now
without it, and more, so how is that an init replacement only ?.
Gnome is full of utilities that start/stop/customize services.
How do you suppose they do that without being dependent on
the .service files?.
That doesn't address the the comment. Deflection ?.
What comment? The kernel vs. systemd comment?
The kernel does what it does, systemd hasn't changed that.
What "show" are you thinking about?
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Whatever, but there is just one primary config file for FreeBSD, where
services can be enabled, drivers loaded and much more. It really isn't
much effort to learn how to do that and there are service management
utilites as well. Typically, just a couple of pages of processes
running with xfce4, less with no gui. Tight design and engineering
efficiency at work. So why do I need systemd ?. Convince me :-)...
One config file for hundreds of possible services?
I don't think so. Like I said, I don't know BSD init but I'm pretty
sure it has a script to start/stop each individual service. That's
hundreds of possible scripts. If they are like SysV init, you can't
tell externally what they do. They have to support stop and start,
do they support restart, reload? Where is the descriptive name of the service?
Sure, thee are config scripts for the various services, but for a
typical system, rarely any need to even look at them. They can be
controlled, start, stop restart etc, from the command line or from
elsewhere, such as the rc.conf file. On solaris, there are the svcs
and svcadm utilities and on FreeBSD, the service utility. I keep
mentioning Solaris, but have used it for decades and FreeBSD is a nod
in that direction, with ZFS, light weight virtualisation ideas
seemingly borrowed from it.
Deflection?
What does ZFS have to do with systemd?
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
h> systemctl status acpid
acpid.service - ACPI Event Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/acpid.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-09-07 12:45:21 EDT; 9h ago
TriggeredBy: acpid.socket
Docs: man:acpid(8)
Main PID: 1023 (acpid)
Tasks: 1 (limit: 2306)
Memory: 248.0K
CPU: 6.613s
CGroup: /system.slice/acpid.service
/usr/sbin/acpid -f
Sep 07 12:45:21 home.home systemd[1]: Started ACPI Event Daemon.
FreeBSD has equivalent management tools. For example, ps -dx
gives a tree structured text listing of the processes on the
system and their hierarchy.The service command will
list services and information, as well as start stop,
restart etc. The top command gives a load of info on running
processes, memory usage, priority and current state, but that's
on most unix systems. Perhaps systemd will do that and more,
but why ?.
So with systemd you get one integrated display of a services status
along with a description of what it does. Linux has all the
tools you mention. Why does systemd tell you all it does?
Because you asked about the services status. It gives you
a complete answer. Is your claim that it's better to have to hunt
around for all that information?
Post by Chris
A quick test here, xfce4 + couple of terminal windows running,
around 75 processes loaded. Now try that with linux and gnome 3.
Do you want a lean and clean street racer,. or a sclerotic mess ?.
I fail to see the significance of your comment about xfce vs. Gnome.
Both work fine with systemd.
Post by Chris
Anyway, you have already said you know nothing about it, so
why not broaden your horizons and give it a test install ?.
Less than an hour of your time, or is a text only install and
package config too difficult ?. Plenty of how to tutorials on
the web if you get stuck...
Is it too difficult?
Are you trying to insult me?
Right now my system is doing everything I need.
So far I haven't seen anything mentioned that would qualify
as an improvement.
I guess I just don't have the "systemd is evil" disease.
While any fool can write a 2 page utility in C, big system
design only succeeds if ideas proven over decades are
followed. This includes ideas such as partitioning, where
the various subsystems are encapsulated and have a defined
call interface for the internal functions. The only
access to the internal functions are through the call
interface and the user needs to know nothing about the
internal code to use the capabilities. So long as the
call interface and functions remain the same, the internal
code can be modified or even completely rewritten with no
effect on the dependent calling services elsewhere.
Actually the sysv init scripts were never part of
the service they controlled. Distro writers provided them.
Systemd enhanced that relationship.
Post by Chris
From what I understand, systemd needs to have
extensive knowledge of all the subsystems it interacts
with,
cat /usr/lib/systemd/user/emacs.service
[Unit]
Description=Emacs: the extensible, self-documenting text editor

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon
ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

...snip
Post by Chris
I mean, why should gnome, a gui, be dependent on systemd ?.
Already explained.
Post by Chris
Then we have the log file problem, which are in binary
format. So how do I deal with that after a system crash ?
Normally, I would boot the distro, mount root and look at
the the text log files, simple, but just another layer
of complexity for it's own sake.
Well, if you want to attack every project done by the
systemd developers go ahead.

The journal is not the init system.

So, what about the old log files?
Still there.

Try this:

journalctl -b -1

(system messages previous boot.)


Going to stop soon.
--
Dan Espen
Chris
2020-09-08 16:33:22 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
I guess I wasn't clear.
The window managers packaged as a 'desktop' tend to be the ones that
change all the time and bounce around.
That is really surreal :-).
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
If you pick one of the more traditional window managers nothing
will bounce around or change without you wanting it to.
My main experience is with Fvwm. Maybe other window managers are
different. Another poster mentioned a twm variant. Very stable,
no bouncing.
Fvwm isn't that bad, iirc, ran it on Suse at one stage, but mate and
xfce4 are more up to date.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
The problem with
systemd is that it has it's fingers into so many things,
Actually no. The systemd project has spread out into many areas.
That's just a sign of how productive the systemd team is.
You are trolling, right ? :-).
I guess you can paint a t**d any colour you like, but it still
stinks underneath.
Ridiculous.\
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
I consider that a separate issue from systemd the replacement from init.
I thought that was the whole point of systemd, an init replacement,
but obviously misjudged it. If true, systemd has visions of empire,
running the whole show instead of the kernel. Thought from the
start that the systemd project was a power grab by Red Hat and all
part of the strategy to exert ever more control over the direction
of Linux as an open source project. In some ways, that's
understandable, since they fund a lot of development, but there's a
fine balance between the idealism and creativity of open source and
the hard edged businesses which companies like Red Hat are.
More ridiculous. The kernel still does what it needs to do.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
And I can't see how it's a problem if one team keeps looking at
Linux thinking what should we improve next. So, to clarify,
it's not systemd that has it's fingers in so many things, it's the
systemd team.
If it ain't broke, dont fix it, though I guess they have to justify
their existence and salaries. With that attitude, no wonder mainstream
Linux looks more and more like a Camel. Change for change's sake
rarely has a good outcome.
I guess your corollary is if it can be improved leave it alone.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Linux
is becoming psychotic, not really knowing what is really running
the show, the kernel, or systemd.
systemd starts all the services. The kernel still does what it's
supposed to do. I don't see a problem.
Post by Chris
Apparently gnome won't run now
without it, and more, so how is that an init replacement only ?.
Gnome is full of utilities that start/stop/customize services.
How do you suppose they do that without being dependent on
the .service files?.
That doesn't address the the comment. Deflection ?.
What comment? The kernel vs. systemd comment?
The kernel does what it does, systemd hasn't changed that.
What "show" are you thinking about?
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Whatever, but there is just one primary config file for FreeBSD, where
services can be enabled, drivers loaded and much more. It really isn't
much effort to learn how to do that and there are service management
utilites as well. Typically, just a couple of pages of processes
running with xfce4, less with no gui. Tight design and engineering
efficiency at work. So why do I need systemd ?. Convince me :-)...
One config file for hundreds of possible services?
I don't think so. Like I said, I don't know BSD init but I'm pretty
sure it has a script to start/stop each individual service. That's
hundreds of possible scripts. If they are like SysV init, you can't
tell externally what they do. They have to support stop and start,
do they support restart, reload? Where is the descriptive name of the service?
Sure, thee are config scripts for the various services, but for a
typical system, rarely any need to even look at them. They can be
controlled, start, stop restart etc, from the command line or from
elsewhere, such as the rc.conf file. On solaris, there are the svcs
and svcadm utilities and on FreeBSD, the service utility. I keep
mentioning Solaris, but have used it for decades and FreeBSD is a nod
in that direction, with ZFS, light weight virtualisation ideas
seemingly borrowed from it.
Deflection?
What does ZFS have to do with systemd?
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
h> systemctl status acpid
acpid.service - ACPI Event Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/acpid.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-09-07 12:45:21 EDT; 9h ago
TriggeredBy: acpid.socket
Docs: man:acpid(8)
Main PID: 1023 (acpid)
Tasks: 1 (limit: 2306)
Memory: 248.0K
CPU: 6.613s
CGroup: /system.slice/acpid.service
/usr/sbin/acpid -f
Sep 07 12:45:21 home.home systemd[1]: Started ACPI Event Daemon.
FreeBSD has equivalent management tools. For example, ps -dx
gives a tree structured text listing of the processes on the
system and their hierarchy.The service command will
list services and information, as well as start stop,
restart etc. The top command gives a load of info on running
processes, memory usage, priority and current state, but that's
on most unix systems. Perhaps systemd will do that and more,
but why ?.
So with systemd you get one integrated display of a services status
along with a description of what it does. Linux has all the
tools you mention. Why does systemd tell you all it does?
Because you asked about the services status. It gives you
a complete answer. Is your claim that it's better to have to hunt
around for all that information?
Post by Chris
A quick test here, xfce4 + couple of terminal windows running,
around 75 processes loaded. Now try that with linux and gnome 3.
Do you want a lean and clean street racer,. or a sclerotic mess ?.
I fail to see the significance of your comment about xfce vs. Gnome.
Both work fine with systemd.
Post by Chris
Anyway, you have already said you know nothing about it, so
why not broaden your horizons and give it a test install ?.
Less than an hour of your time, or is a text only install and
package config too difficult ?. Plenty of how to tutorials on
the web if you get stuck...
Is it too difficult?
Are you trying to insult me?
Right now my system is doing everything I need.
So far I haven't seen anything mentioned that would qualify
as an improvement.
I guess I just don't have the "systemd is evil" disease.
While any fool can write a 2 page utility in C, big system
design only succeeds if ideas proven over decades are
followed. This includes ideas such as partitioning, where
the various subsystems are encapsulated and have a defined
call interface for the internal functions. The only
access to the internal functions are through the call
interface and the user needs to know nothing about the
internal code to use the capabilities. So long as the
call interface and functions remain the same, the internal
code can be modified or even completely rewritten with no
effect on the dependent calling services elsewhere.
Actually the sysv init scripts were never part of
the service they controlled. Distro writers provided them.
Systemd enhanced that relationship.
Post by Chris
From what I understand, systemd needs to have
extensive knowledge of all the subsystems it interacts
with,
cat /usr/lib/systemd/user/emacs.service
[Unit]
Description=Emacs: the extensible, self-documenting text editor
[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon
ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
...snip
How is that in any way relevant ?. Doesn't explain the underlying
tech, which might be enlightening.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I mean, why should gnome, a gui, be dependent on systemd ?.
Already explained.
Don't remember seeing any explanation as to why it needs
systemd.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Then we have the log file problem, which are in binary
format. So how do I deal with that after a system crash ?
Normally, I would boot the distro, mount root and look at
the the text log files, simple, but just another layer
of complexity for it's own sake.
Well, if you want to attack every project done by the
systemd developers go ahead.
The journal is not the init system.
So, what about the old log files?
Still there.
journalctl -b -1
(system messages previous boot.)
So why do we need journalctl(), never heard of it. What's wrong
with more /var/log/messages, or tail /var/log/messages, or
even dmesg ?. Plain text, no less.
Post by Dan Espen
Going to stop soon.
Judging by the comments elsewhere, you might just lose
this debate, but that's democracy for you. You like it,
fine, keep using it...

Chris
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 17:47:08 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I mean, why should gnome, a gui, be dependent on systemd ?.
Already explained.
Don't remember seeing any explanation as to why it needs
systemd.
Gnome contains tools that manage your services.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Then we have the log file problem, which are in binary
format. So how do I deal with that after a system crash ?
Normally, I would boot the distro, mount root and look at
the the text log files, simple, but just another layer
of complexity for it's own sake.
Well, if you want to attack every project done by the
systemd developers go ahead.
The journal is not the init system.
So, what about the old log files?
Still there.
journalctl -b -1
(system messages previous boot.)
So why do we need journalctl(), never heard of it. What's wrong
with more /var/log/messages, or tail /var/log/messages, or
even dmesg ?. Plain text, no less.
Nothing wrong with those logs and they still exist.
If you want to do something like show messages starting at the last
boot, you're going to need more data in the log than is in /var/log/messages.

journalctl has lots of other tricks.
--
Dan Espen
Chris
2020-09-08 18:49:30 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I mean, why should gnome, a gui, be dependent on systemd ?.
Already explained.
Don't remember seeing any explanation as to why it needs
systemd.
Gnome contains tools that manage your services.
Ok, so the desktop utils call into systemd functions, which
might limit functionality, but would the gui run at all
without systemd ?. that being the critical question.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Then we have the log file problem, which are in binary
format. So how do I deal with that after a system crash ?
Normally, I would boot the distro, mount root and look at
the the text log files, simple, but just another layer
of complexity for it's own sake.
Well, if you want to attack every project done by the
systemd developers go ahead.
The journal is not the init system.
So, what about the old log files?
Still there.
journalctl -b -1
(system messages previous boot.)
So why do we need journalctl(), never heard of it. What's wrong
with more /var/log/messages, or tail /var/log/messages, or
even dmesg ?. Plain text, no less.
Nothing wrong with those logs and they still exist.
If you want to do something like show messages starting at the last
boot, you're going to need more data in the log than is in /var/log/messages.
journalctl has lots of other tricks.
Ok, but if it were just another init replacement, a plugin module
that could be swapped for something else, it could be evaluated
on that basis, but it's far more than that and that is the problem
with it.

It won't be the last word, but the trouble is that just about all
mainstream Linux is encumbered with it. Great strategy for Red Hat...

Chris
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 19:35:17 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I mean, why should gnome, a gui, be dependent on systemd ?.
Already explained.
Don't remember seeing any explanation as to why it needs systemd.
Gnome contains tools that manage your services.
Ok, so the desktop utils call into systemd functions, which might
limit functionality, but would the gui run at all without systemd
?. that being the critical question.
Of course they do.

Here:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/GNOME_Without_systemd

The popular GNOME 3 desktop environment may be used under the OpenRC
init system in Gentoo (as well as the default systemd).
--
Dan Espen
Mike Spencer
2020-09-08 23:01:32 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
My main experience is with Fvwm. Maybe other window managers are
different. Another poster mentioned a twm variant. Very stable,
no bouncing.
FWIW, I've been running twm with no "desktop"-ware since my 2nd
installation of Linux. The 1st try was Caldera Linux, which came up
by default with KDE and supplied XEmacs. Horrified, quickly as
possible from a rural location with dialup net, I replaced XEmacs with
GNU Emacs and, a little later, Caldera with Slackware and twm.

So, excepting occasional sessions for particular purposes in a plain
console, I'm in X with twm all the time.

As a non-IT-pro, just an aging wannabe amateur hacker with most of my
chops in fully analog enterprises such as blacksmithing and vegetable
gardening, I *like* the init scripts. Systemd looms on the horizon as
an ominous derecho of stuff that will be yet another instance of
converting "life-long learning" into "learning the same stuff over and
over again".

And yes, no bouncing, animations or terminal cuteness.
--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
Dan Espen
2020-09-09 00:16:25 UTC
Permalink
Post by Mike Spencer
Post by Dan Espen
My main experience is with Fvwm. Maybe other window managers are
different. Another poster mentioned a twm variant. Very stable,
no bouncing.
FWIW, I've been running twm with no "desktop"-ware since my 2nd
installation of Linux. The 1st try was Caldera Linux, which came up
by default with KDE and supplied XEmacs. Horrified, quickly as
possible from a rural location with dialup net, I replaced XEmacs with
GNU Emacs and, a little later, Caldera with Slackware and twm.
So, excepting occasional sessions for particular purposes in a plain
console, I'm in X with twm all the time.
As a non-IT-pro, just an aging wannabe amateur hacker with most of my
chops in fully analog enterprises such as blacksmithing and vegetable
gardening, I *like* the init scripts. Systemd looms on the horizon as
an ominous derecho of stuff that will be yet another instance of
converting "life-long learning" into "learning the same stuff over and
over again".
And yes, no bouncing, animations or terminal cuteness.
I didn't want a desktop but I did want access to the various
configuration GUIs the desktops use. It's hard to find them because the
documentatioon rarely mentions the executables name. Instead they say
which menu to look in.

If you look around you'll probably find a tool that will generate twm
xdg menus. We have one in Fvwm. I use it every once in a while.
I looked around and found one that was okay for Fvwm, but I cloned it,
souped it up and made it part of Fvwm. I'm pretty sure the tool I
tracked down had a twm version.

Yep:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-menu
--
Dan Espen
Mike Spencer
2020-09-09 06:50:05 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Mike Spencer
As a non-IT-pro, just an aging wannabe amateur hacker with most of my
chops in fully analog enterprises such as blacksmithing and vegetable
gardening, I *like* the init scripts. Systemd looms on the horizon as
an ominous derecho of stuff that will be yet another instance of
converting "life-long learning" into "learning the same stuff over and
over again".
I didn't want a desktop but I did want access to the various
configuration GUIs the desktops use. It's hard to find them because the
documentatioon rarely mentions the executables name. Instead they say
which menu to look in.
If you look around you'll probably find a tool that will generate twm
xdg menus.
Didn't know what xdg was. Doesn't look like anything I'd want to use,
let alone work hard to configure.
Post by Dan Espen
We have one in Fvwm. I use it every once in a while. I looked
around and found one that was okay for Fvwm, but I cloned it, souped
it up and made it part of Fvwm. I'm pretty sure the tool I tracked
down had a twm version.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-menu
Thanks for that. Learn something every day. "Never say never" but
not likely to go there. I have done a very little direct tweaking of
the twm config file. I did once fiddle with (hack?) Vernon Buerg's
LIST under MS-DOS to do what I gather xdg-open does. Ancient history
-- oh, wait! This is alt.folklore.computers!
--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
Charlie Gibbs
2020-09-09 17:20:50 UTC
Permalink
Post by Mike Spencer
Thanks for that. Learn something every day. "Never say never" but
not likely to go there. I have done a very little direct tweaking of
the twm config file. I did once fiddle with (hack?) Vernon Buerg's
LIST under MS-DOS to do what I gather xdg-open does. Ancient history
-- oh, wait! This is alt.folklore.computers!
What do you mean, ancient history? I still use LIST.COM daily,
because I love the keyboard interface. It runs fine under XP.
--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <***@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.
Mike Spencer
2020-09-10 06:29:02 UTC
Permalink
Post by Charlie Gibbs
Post by Mike Spencer
Thanks for that. Learn something every day. "Never say never" but
not likely to go there. I have done a very little direct tweaking of
the twm config file. I did once fiddle with (hack?) Vernon Buerg's
LIST under MS-DOS to do what I gather xdg-open does. Ancient history
-- oh, wait! This is alt.folklore.computers!
What do you mean, ancient history? I still use LIST.COM daily,
because I love the keyboard interface. It runs fine under XP.
Ha! More power to you. I've moved entirely to Linux since '99 except
for a DOS 5 partition that I've maintained so I can play Civilization
I. [1] Even that is down at the moment as I made a mistake in my
recent re-installation of Linux. Oh, and LIST.COM won't run under
dosemu in Linux but Civ I will. But from '94 to '99 -- my DOS era --
it was a major asset for me.

I now get similar, keyboard-controlled functionality from GNU Emacs
dired. It doesn't do (or I haven't learned how to make it do)
xdg-open-like tricks but I'm happy enough.


[1] And an ancient laptop with Win 3.1 because that's the only thing
that will run proprietary software that talks to an early Kodak.
Clunky camera but produces outstanding colors for landscapes.
--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
Joe Pfeiffer
2020-09-08 15:20:20 UTC
Permalink
If all systemd did was control the process and the daemons, I'd be a
*big* supporter as well -- you're right about it fixing sysvinit's
issues.

What I don't like about it is the extent to which a lot of perfectly
good, limited purpose daemons are being folded into it. There was no
reason to fold udev into it, no reason to fold logind into it...
Scott Lurndal
2020-09-08 15:39:36 UTC
Permalink
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
If all systemd did was control the process and the daemons, I'd be a
*big* supporter as well -- you're right about it fixing sysvinit's
issues.
What I don't like about it is the extent to which a lot of perfectly
good, limited purpose daemons are being folded into it. There was no
reason to fold udev into it, no reason to fold logind into it...
And it has no business handing DNS.
Joe Pfeiffer
2020-09-08 18:01:11 UTC
Permalink
Post by Scott Lurndal
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
If all systemd did was control the process and the daemons, I'd be a
*big* supporter as well -- you're right about it fixing sysvinit's
issues.
What I don't like about it is the extent to which a lot of perfectly
good, limited purpose daemons are being folded into it. There was no
reason to fold udev into it, no reason to fold logind into it...
And it has no business handing DNS.
Another good example.
Anssi Saari
2020-09-09 14:59:53 UTC
Permalink
Post by Scott Lurndal
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
If all systemd did was control the process and the daemons, I'd be a
*big* supporter as well -- you're right about it fixing sysvinit's
issues.
What I don't like about it is the extent to which a lot of perfectly
good, limited purpose daemons are being folded into it. There was no
reason to fold udev into it, no reason to fold logind into it...
And it has no business handing DNS.
Well, what if you want to use a different DNS per network interface?
For me it's useful and great and I'm really happy systemd (or actually
systemd-networkd) provides this.
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 15:54:30 UTC
Permalink
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
If all systemd did was control the process and the daemons, I'd be a
*big* supporter as well -- you're right about it fixing sysvinit's
issues.
What I don't like about it is the extent to which a lot of perfectly
good, limited purpose daemons are being folded into it. There was no
reason to fold udev into it, no reason to fold logind into it...
I'm not sure what you mean by folding into it.

x> systemctl status '*login*'
systemd-logind.service - Login Service
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-logind.service; static; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-09-07 12:45:05 EDT; 22h ago
Docs: man:systemd-logind.service(8)
man:logind.conf(5)
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/logind
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat
Main PID: 742 (systemd-logind)
Status: "Processing requests..."
Tasks: 1 (limit: 2306)
Memory: 1.9M
CPU: 12.370s
CGroup: /system.slice/systemd-logind.service
/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind

Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd[1]: Starting Login Service...
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd-logind[742]: New seat seat0.
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd-logind[742]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event1 (Power Button)
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd-logind[742]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event0 (Power Button)
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd-logind[742]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event2 (AT Translated Set 2 keyboard)
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd[1]: Started Login Service.
Sep 07 12:45:19 home.home systemd-logind[742]: New session 1 of user dan.

Looks like a separate process.

Further searches:

https://yakking.branchable.com/posts/systemd-4-logind/

systemd has a service for managing user sessions called logind(8),
this replaces the existing ConsoleKit tool, which was the previous
cross-desktop and cross-distribution tool.

This caused some controversy, as logind(8) is not usable without
systemd, and the fear was that this would cause distributions to force
the use of systemd.

There was some misplaced anger at both the systemd developers and the
GNOME developers, when the GNOME package maintainers in Debian decided
to build GNOME without ConsoleKit support, as GNOME still supported
being built with ConsoleKit, and the systemd developers are not
responsible for other developers' decisions to support logind(8)
exclusively.

So is the issue that the new logind requires systemd?

I guess that's a problem for users that don't want systemd but don't
want to support their own logind.
--
Dan Espen
Chris
2020-09-08 16:18:39 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Joe Pfeiffer
If all systemd did was control the process and the daemons, I'd be a
*big* supporter as well -- you're right about it fixing sysvinit's
issues.
What I don't like about it is the extent to which a lot of perfectly
good, limited purpose daemons are being folded into it. There was no
reason to fold udev into it, no reason to fold logind into it...
I'm not sure what you mean by folding into it.
x> systemctl status '*login*'
systemd-logind.service - Login Service
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-logind.service; static; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-09-07 12:45:05 EDT; 22h ago
Docs: man:systemd-logind.service(8)
man:logind.conf(5)
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/logind
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat
Main PID: 742 (systemd-logind)
Status: "Processing requests..."
Tasks: 1 (limit: 2306)
Memory: 1.9M
CPU: 12.370s
CGroup: /system.slice/systemd-logind.service
/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd[1]: Starting Login Service...
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd-logind[742]: New seat seat0.
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd-logind[742]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event1 (Power Button)
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd-logind[742]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event0 (Power Button)
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd-logind[742]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event2 (AT Translated Set 2 keyboard)
Sep 07 12:45:05 home.home systemd[1]: Started Login Service.
Sep 07 12:45:19 home.home systemd-logind[742]: New session 1 of user dan.
Looks like a separate process.
https://yakking.branchable.com/posts/systemd-4-logind/
systemd has a service for managing user sessions called logind(8),
this replaces the existing ConsoleKit tool, which was the previous
cross-desktop and cross-distribution tool.
This caused some controversy, as logind(8) is not usable without
systemd, and the fear was that this would cause distributions to force
the use of systemd.
There was some misplaced anger at both the systemd developers and the
GNOME developers, when the GNOME package maintainers in Debian decided
to build GNOME without ConsoleKit support, as GNOME still supported
being built with ConsoleKit, and the systemd developers are not
responsible for other developers' decisions to support logind(8)
exclusively.
So is the issue that the new logind requires systemd?
I guess that's a problem for users that don't want systemd but don't
want to support their own logind.
No, ,the issue is that the systemd implementation takes away choice,
our way the highway, when the whole point of open source is about
choice and openness.

I don't normally attribute malfeasance where incompetence is more
likely, but if you wanted to make a system more, rather than less
opaque, then systemd would be the ideal solution...

Chris
gareth evans
2020-09-08 18:44:53 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
No, ,the issue is that the systemd implementation takes away choice,
Sounds like W10!
John Levine
2020-09-08 01:27:54 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
ZFS is great. It handles all the complex disk management in a coherent
way. It handles combinations of RAID and disk mirroring and SSD caches
and and lets you efficiently create lots of logical partitions sharing
a pool of space, but with each partition having different compression,
filename rules, quotas, and so forth. It also lets you make snapshots
of a partition's state and efficiently roll forward and back which
makes backup and restore a lot easier.

My FreeBSD server has four disks configured as two mirrored pairs in
one pool, with 58 logical partitions so I can manage each user or each
web site separately.

I happen to find FreeBSD's rc.d startup and shutdown scripts quite
adequate but I realize I'm not going to win arguments with people who
like systemd.
--
Regards,
John Levine, ***@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 02:54:04 UTC
Permalink
Post by John Levine
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
ZFS is great. It handles all the complex disk management in a coherent
way. It handles combinations of RAID and disk mirroring and SSD caches
and and lets you efficiently create lots of logical partitions sharing
a pool of space, but with each partition having different compression,
filename rules, quotas, and so forth. It also lets you make snapshots
of a partition's state and efficiently roll forward and back which
makes backup and restore a lot easier.
My FreeBSD server has four disks configured as two mirrored pairs in
one pool, with 58 logical partitions so I can manage each user or each
web site separately.
Yeah, sorry, I was speaking with the home user blinders on.
For my own use I have no use for an LVM and I disabled the one
Fedora likes to turn on.

I've got the system on a 128G SSD and /home on a 1TB SSD.
1TB seemed like a high storage capacity, but with many users
I guess that's a drop in the bucket. I'm not sure where
my storage would exceed system capacity.

Backups are /home only to 2 USB sticks. I don't need to backup the
system, if I lost it, I'd just get a new disk and reinstall.

Fedora is pushing xfs, not sure how it's diffrent than ext4 but
I get by with ext4 fine.
--
Dan Espen
Peter Flass
2020-09-08 15:44:51 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by John Levine
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
ZFS is great. It handles all the complex disk management in a coherent
way. It handles combinations of RAID and disk mirroring and SSD caches
and and lets you efficiently create lots of logical partitions sharing
a pool of space, but with each partition having different compression,
filename rules, quotas, and so forth. It also lets you make snapshots
of a partition's state and efficiently roll forward and back which
makes backup and restore a lot easier.
My FreeBSD server has four disks configured as two mirrored pairs in
one pool, with 58 logical partitions so I can manage each user or each
web site separately.
Yeah, sorry, I was speaking with the home user blinders on.
For my own use I have no use for an LVM and I disabled the one
Fedora likes to turn on.
I tried it, because Fedora wanted to enable it by default. It caused so
much trouble I think I finally had to wipe the disk. At that point I
installed Ubuntu which, although not perfect, seems to be a better fit for
me. The thing is, I was familiar with a lot of LVM from using DFSMS on zOS,
and I still had trouble.
Post by Dan Espen
I've got the system on a 128G SSD and /home on a 1TB SSD.
1TB seemed like a high storage capacity, but with many users
I guess that's a drop in the bucket. I'm not sure where
my storage would exceed system capacity.
Backups are /home only to 2 USB sticks. I don't need to backup the
system, if I lost it, I'd just get a new disk and reinstall.
Fedora is pushing xfs, not sure how it's diffrent than ext4 but
I get by with ext4 fine.
Works for me, too.
--
Pete
Niklas Karlsson
2020-09-08 16:01:48 UTC
Permalink
Post by Peter Flass
Post by Dan Espen
Yeah, sorry, I was speaking with the home user blinders on.
For my own use I have no use for an LVM and I disabled the one
Fedora likes to turn on.
I tried it, because Fedora wanted to enable it by default. It caused so
much trouble I think I finally had to wipe the disk. At that point I
installed Ubuntu which, although not perfect, seems to be a better fit for
me. The thing is, I was familiar with a lot of LVM from using DFSMS on zOS,
and I still had trouble.
I'm surprised. LVM on Linux has always been smooth sailing for me. Maybe
it gets dicier if you have to shrink a volume and file system, which
I've never really had to do.

LVM is convenient for me even at home, since I run one or more Linux
VMs. Should I run out of space, I can just hang another virtual disk on
it, add it to the volume group and then grow the LV and the file system
in one swell foop. Always worked nicely.

Niklas
--
Part of the survival techniques of driving in Massachusetts is to
allow the car to roll back an inch so that the driver behind you
thinks you're a dumb broad who can't drive and stays 5' away.
-- Barb Huizenga
Peter Flass
2020-09-08 16:33:18 UTC
Permalink
Post by Niklas Karlsson
Post by Peter Flass
Post by Dan Espen
Yeah, sorry, I was speaking with the home user blinders on.
For my own use I have no use for an LVM and I disabled the one
Fedora likes to turn on.
I tried it, because Fedora wanted to enable it by default. It caused so
much trouble I think I finally had to wipe the disk. At that point I
installed Ubuntu which, although not perfect, seems to be a better fit for
me. The thing is, I was familiar with a lot of LVM from using DFSMS on zOS,
and I still had trouble.
I'm surprised. LVM on Linux has always been smooth sailing for me. Maybe
it gets dicier if you have to shrink a volume and file system, which
I've never really had to do.
Maybe that was it. I think I had a full-disk LV and wanted to partition it.
I recall having to edit the LVM definitions by hand to get the system to
work at all, and at that point I decided it wasn’t worth it.
Post by Niklas Karlsson
LVM is convenient for me even at home, since I run one or more Linux
VMs. Should I run out of space, I can just hang another virtual disk on
it, add it to the volume group and then grow the LV and the file system
in one swell foop. Always worked nicely.
Niklas
--
Pete
Peter Flass
2020-09-08 15:44:50 UTC
Permalink
Post by John Levine
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
ZFS is great. It handles all the complex disk management in a coherent
way. It handles combinations of RAID and disk mirroring and SSD caches
and and lets you efficiently create lots of logical partitions sharing
a pool of space, but with each partition having different compression,
filename rules, quotas, and so forth. It also lets you make snapshots
of a partition's state and efficiently roll forward and back which
makes backup and restore a lot easier.
My FreeBSD server has four disks configured as two mirrored pairs in
one pool, with 58 logical partitions so I can manage each user or each
web site separately.
I happen to find FreeBSD's rc.d startup and shutdown scripts quite
adequate but I realize I'm not going to win arguments with people who
like systemd.
I’m agnostic. I just want my system to WORK.
--
Pete
Chris
2020-09-08 16:00:51 UTC
Permalink
Post by Peter Flass
Post by John Levine
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
ZFS is great. It handles all the complex disk management in a coherent
way. It handles combinations of RAID and disk mirroring and SSD caches
and and lets you efficiently create lots of logical partitions sharing
a pool of space, but with each partition having different compression,
filename rules, quotas, and so forth. It also lets you make snapshots
of a partition's state and efficiently roll forward and back which
makes backup and restore a lot easier.
My FreeBSD server has four disks configured as two mirrored pairs in
one pool, with 58 logical partitions so I can manage each user or each
web site separately.
I happen to find FreeBSD's rc.d startup and shutdown scripts quite
adequate but I realize I'm not going to win arguments with people who
like systemd.
I’m agnostic. I just want my system to WORK.
Ditto, and when something does go wrong, not have layers and layers of
opaque cross dependencies to debug it all...

Chris
Peter Flass
2020-09-08 16:33:17 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by Peter Flass
Post by John Levine
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
ZFS is great. It handles all the complex disk management in a coherent
way. It handles combinations of RAID and disk mirroring and SSD caches
and and lets you efficiently create lots of logical partitions sharing
a pool of space, but with each partition having different compression,
filename rules, quotas, and so forth. It also lets you make snapshots
of a partition's state and efficiently roll forward and back which
makes backup and restore a lot easier.
My FreeBSD server has four disks configured as two mirrored pairs in
one pool, with 58 logical partitions so I can manage each user or each
web site separately.
I happen to find FreeBSD's rc.d startup and shutdown scripts quite
adequate but I realize I'm not going to win arguments with people who
like systemd.
I’m agnostic. I just want my system to WORK.
Ditto, and when something does go wrong, not have layers and layers of
opaque cross dependencies to debug it all...
Yes. The days of CP/M users “hacking the BIOS”, or whatever it was, for fun
are over for most of us. I mostly use my computer as a tool, although I use
it to develop software. I want the system to fade into the background and
not need constant upgrades and tweaks.

I know some people enjoy customizing and playing with their systems, but
I’ve done too many installs to bother with things like custom fonts and
wallpaper. I have a set of tools that work and just stick with them.
Post by Chris
Chris
--
Pete
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 17:41:25 UTC
Permalink
Post by Peter Flass
I’ve done too many installs to bother with things like custom fonts and
wallpaper.
Speaking of wallpaper...

Can this develop into another war? I don't see how.

Just folklore.

I'm a big fan of an image on the root.
But then my common mode of operation is to iconify a window then switch
to another window. So I see the root a lot.

I want an image there, but I've never found an image that I'd want to
stare at day after day.

So, I did this at work and it was a pretty popular feature of the Sun
workstation users that used the environment I established.

I wanted attractive images but I didn't want to get bored. So I
endeavored to download lots of images and have the computer change the
image every hour. APOD was a good source, but I found images in lots of
places. I wanted enough images that the viewer would pretty much forget
the image from the last viewing.

Unix has a lot of programs that can put an image on the root but none of
the images fit exactly. Some needed to be stretched one way, some the
other. Some actually looked better tiled over the background.

So, I created a file called "root.commands", each line in the file
contained a command that displayed an image in the best way.
I added a comment at the end of the command that categorized the image,
like 'space far', 'flower rose', 'joke', 'Train', 'SciFi'.

Then I wrote a command called 'calc.next' that looked in the file,
and another file, 'current.line' and computed the next line to display.
Comments in root.commands were ignored, and the count wrapped around
when the end of the file was reached. That was executed by each user under
control of cron a few minutes before the background change.

Another command 'do.next' just used 'current.line' to find and execute
the command from root.commands. That was in everyone's cron too.

So, that worked pretty well until I added a user that got really upset
by some of the images, especially some of the dragon artwork.

So, I updated calc.next to look into the users '.rootshow' file
for include/bypass rules. This user settled on flowers only.

Then a few more tweaks. We had employee children visit the site
in their costumes every Halloween. I modified the "great rootshow"
to show only Halloween images on Halloween or the weekday before
Halloween.

Lastly I auto-generated Fvwm menus using the comments for categories.
That was quite a bit of menus. There were over a thousand lines
in root commands. That way a user could look for and display
an image by its category if the mood took him.

Sadly, all those Sun Workstation users are now relegated to
Windows boxes so the Great Rootshow only lives on on my desktop.
--
Dan Espen
Chris
2020-09-08 18:37:56 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Peter Flass
I’ve done too many installs to bother with things like custom fonts and
wallpaper.
Speaking of wallpaper...
Can this develop into another war? I don't see how.
Just folklore.
I'm a big fan of an image on the root.
But then my common mode of operation is to iconify a window then switch
to another window. So I see the root a lot.
I want an image there, but I've never found an image that I'd want to
stare at day after day.
So, I did this at work and it was a pretty popular feature of the Sun
workstation users that used the environment I established.
I wanted attractive images but I didn't want to get bored. So I
endeavored to download lots of images and have the computer change the
image every hour. APOD was a good source, but I found images in lots of
places. I wanted enough images that the viewer would pretty much forget
the image from the last viewing.
Unix has a lot of programs that can put an image on the root but none of
the images fit exactly. Some needed to be stretched one way, some the
other. Some actually looked better tiled over the background.
So, I created a file called "root.commands", each line in the file
contained a command that displayed an image in the best way.
I added a comment at the end of the command that categorized the image,
like 'space far', 'flower rose', 'joke', 'Train', 'SciFi'.
Then I wrote a command called 'calc.next' that looked in the file,
and another file, 'current.line' and computed the next line to display.
Comments in root.commands were ignored, and the count wrapped around
when the end of the file was reached. That was executed by each user under
control of cron a few minutes before the background change.
Another command 'do.next' just used 'current.line' to find and execute
the command from root.commands. That was in everyone's cron too.
So, that worked pretty well until I added a user that got really upset
by some of the images, especially some of the dragon artwork.
So, I updated calc.next to look into the users '.rootshow' file
for include/bypass rules. This user settled on flowers only.
Then a few more tweaks. We had employee children visit the site
in their costumes every Halloween. I modified the "great rootshow"
to show only Halloween images on Halloween or the weekday before
Halloween.
Lastly I auto-generated Fvwm menus using the comments for categories.
That was quite a bit of menus. There were over a thousand lines
in root commands. That way a user could look for and display
an image by its category if the mood took him.
Sadly, all those Sun Workstation users are now relegated to
Windows boxes so the Great Rootshow only lives on on my desktop.
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the
colour to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across
the screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random
from a distance, but look carefully to see the detail...

Chris
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 19:31:06 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the
colour to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across
the screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random
from a distance, but look carefully to see the detail...
I believe I have 2 Solaris backgrounds in the root show.
The fishtank and 3d letters spelling SUN.

I mostly use xli (a version of xloadimage) and do the scaling during display.
--
Dan Espen
Chris
2020-09-08 21:54:51 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the
colour to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across
the screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random
from a distance, but look carefully to see the detail...
I believe I have 2 Solaris backgrounds in the root show.
The fishtank and 3d letters spelling SUN.
I mostly use xli (a version of xloadimage) and do the scaling during display.
Whatever, but getting back to systemd, was thinking about how it
works internally, since one of the problems it attempts to solve,
apparently, is the startup of various processes in the correct
order and with dependencies. For example, you don't want
to start up the ntp daemon before the networking stack
is up and online.

That means it must have an internal priority list for the
things it's responsible for and uses that initially to start
the lot, but sleeping. Checks back every so often to get
status, so knows when other processes are ready be woken up
and run.

Various ways to do that, but an interesting design problem
none the less...

Chris
Dan Espen
2020-09-08 22:09:02 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the
colour to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across
the screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random
from a distance, but look carefully to see the detail...
I believe I have 2 Solaris backgrounds in the root show.
The fishtank and 3d letters spelling SUN.
I mostly use xli (a version of xloadimage) and do the scaling during display.
Whatever, but getting back to systemd, was thinking about how it
works internally, since one of the problems it attempts to solve,
apparently, is the startup of various processes in the correct
order and with dependencies. For example, you don't want
to start up the ntp daemon before the networking stack
is up and online.
That means it must have an internal priority list for the
things it's responsible for and uses that initially to start
the lot, but sleeping. Checks back every so often to get
status, so knows when other processes are ready be woken up
and run.
Various ways to do that, but an interesting design problem
none the less...
Not sure what you mean by internal priority list.

All of that info is in the .service files.
There's no hard coded logic about services in systemd.

In short what the systemd developers did was look at
everything all those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing
and abstracted it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a
clean design because each service has only 1 file with just a few
entries being needed for each service.
--
Dan Espen
Chris
2020-09-08 22:18:26 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the
colour to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across
the screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random
from a distance, but look carefully to see the detail...
I believe I have 2 Solaris backgrounds in the root show.
The fishtank and 3d letters spelling SUN.
I mostly use xli (a version of xloadimage) and do the scaling during display.
Whatever, but getting back to systemd, was thinking about how it
works internally, since one of the problems it attempts to solve,
apparently, is the startup of various processes in the correct
order and with dependencies. For example, you don't want
to start up the ntp daemon before the networking stack
is up and online.
That means it must have an internal priority list for the
things it's responsible for and uses that initially to start
the lot, but sleeping. Checks back every so often to get
status, so knows when other processes are ready be woken up
and run.
Various ways to do that, but an interesting design problem
none the less...
Not sure what you mean by internal priority list.
Some data file that specifies the dependencies and order in
which the various services are started up.
Post by Dan Espen
All of that info is in the .service files.
There's no hard coded logic about services in systemd.
I wouldn't expect it to. Minimally, all it needs is an ordered
list of processes and their dependencies.
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at
everything all those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing
and abstracted it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a
clean design because each service has only 1 file with just a few
entries being needed for each service.
That's a different issue to the priority problem, which I understood
was one of the things that it was designed to address. Maybe not...

Chris
Dan Espen
2020-09-09 00:10:12 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the
colour to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across
the screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random
from a distance, but look carefully to see the detail...
I believe I have 2 Solaris backgrounds in the root show.
The fishtank and 3d letters spelling SUN.
I mostly use xli (a version of xloadimage) and do the scaling during display.
Whatever, but getting back to systemd, was thinking about how it
works internally, since one of the problems it attempts to solve,
apparently, is the startup of various processes in the correct
order and with dependencies. For example, you don't want
to start up the ntp daemon before the networking stack
is up and online.
That means it must have an internal priority list for the
things it's responsible for and uses that initially to start
the lot, but sleeping. Checks back every so often to get
status, so knows when other processes are ready be woken up
and run.
Various ways to do that, but an interesting design problem
none the less...
Not sure what you mean by internal priority list.
Some data file that specifies the dependencies and order in
which the various services are started up.
Post by Dan Espen
All of that info is in the .service files.
There's no hard coded logic about services in systemd.
I wouldn't expect it to. Minimally, all it needs is an ordered
list of processes and their dependencies.
It's not really an ordered list;
Post by Chris
cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/nfs-server.service
[Unit]
Description=NFS server and services
DefaultDependencies=no
Requires=network.target proc-fs-nfsd.mount
Requires=nfs-mountd.service
Wants=rpcbind.socket network-online.target
Wants=rpc-statd.service nfs-idmapd.service
Wants=rpc-statd-notify.service
Wants=nfsdcld.service

After=network-online.target local-fs.target
After=proc-fs-nfsd.mount rpcbind.socket nfs-mountd.service
After=nfs-idmapd.service rpc-statd.service
After=nfsdcld.service
Before=rpc-statd-notify.service

# GSS services dependencies and ordering
Wants=auth-rpcgss-module.service
After=rpc-gssd.service gssproxy.service rpc-svcgssd.service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd
ExecStart=-/bin/sh -c 'if systemctl -q is-active gssproxy; then systemctl reload gssproxy ; fi'
ExecStop=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd 0
ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -au
ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -f

ExecReload=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target


Notice how it declares what it requires, it's order, and what wants it.

Internally systemd creates a tree structure and works up and down the
tree as needed.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at
everything all those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing
and abstracted it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a
clean design because each service has only 1 file with just a few
entries being needed for each service.
That's a different issue to the priority problem, which I understood
was one of the things that it was designed to address. Maybe not...
The .service files declare interdependence. (What you're calling
priority.)
--
Dan Espen
Bob Eager
2020-09-09 09:41:57 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the colour
to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across the
screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random from a
distance, but look carefully to see the detail...
I believe I have 2 Solaris backgrounds in the root show.
The fishtank and 3d letters spelling SUN.
I mostly use xli (a version of xloadimage) and do the scaling during display.
Whatever, but getting back to systemd, was thinking about how it
works internally, since one of the problems it attempts to solve,
apparently, is the startup of various processes in the correct order
and with dependencies. For example, you don't want to start up the
ntp daemon before the networking stack is up and online.
That means it must have an internal priority list for the things it's
responsible for and uses that initially to start the lot, but
sleeping. Checks back every so often to get status, so knows when
other processes are ready be woken up and run.
Various ways to do that, but an interesting design problem none the
less...
Not sure what you mean by internal priority list.
Some data file that specifies the dependencies and order in which the
various services are started up.
Post by Dan Espen
All of that info is in the .service files.
There's no hard coded logic about services in systemd.
I wouldn't expect it to. Minimally, all it needs is an ordered list of
processes and their dependencies.
It's not really an ordered list;
cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/nfs-server.service
[Unit]
Description=NFS server and services DefaultDependencies=no
Requires=network.target proc-fs-nfsd.mount Requires=nfs-mountd.service
Wants=rpcbind.socket network-online.target Wants=rpc-statd.service
nfs-idmapd.service Wants=rpc-statd-notify.service Wants=nfsdcld.service
After=network-online.target local-fs.target After=proc-fs-nfsd.mount
rpcbind.socket nfs-mountd.service After=nfs-idmapd.service
rpc-statd.service After=nfsdcld.service Before=rpc-statd-notify.service
# GSS services dependencies and ordering
Wants=auth-rpcgss-module.service After=rpc-gssd.service gssproxy.service
rpc-svcgssd.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot RemainAfterExit=yes ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd ExecStart=-/bin/sh -c 'if systemctl -q
is-active gssproxy; then systemctl reload gssproxy ; fi'
ExecStop=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd 0 ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -au
ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -f
ExecReload=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Notice how it declares what it requires, it's order, and what wants it.
Internally systemd creates a tree structure and works up and down the
tree as needed.
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at everything all
those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing and abstracted
it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a clean design
because each service has only 1 file with just a few entries being
needed for each service.
That's a different issue to the priority problem, which I understood
was one of the things that it was designed to address. Maybe not...
The .service files declare interdependence. (What you're calling
priority.)
No different on FreeBSD really (but without systemd!). A single script,
which also declares dependencies.

The script starts:

#!/bin/sh

# PROVIDE: nfsd
# REQUIRE: mountcritremote mountd hostname gssd nfsuserd
# KEYWORD: nojail shutdown

. /etc/rc.subr

name="nfsd"
desc="Remote NFS server"
rcvar="nfs_server_enable"
command="/usr/sbin/${name}"
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Dan Espen
2020-09-09 12:34:53 UTC
Permalink
Post by Bob Eager
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the colour
to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across the
screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random from a
distance, but look carefully to see the detail...
I believe I have 2 Solaris backgrounds in the root show.
The fishtank and 3d letters spelling SUN.
I mostly use xli (a version of xloadimage) and do the scaling during display.
Whatever, but getting back to systemd, was thinking about how it
works internally, since one of the problems it attempts to solve,
apparently, is the startup of various processes in the correct order
and with dependencies. For example, you don't want to start up the
ntp daemon before the networking stack is up and online.
That means it must have an internal priority list for the things it's
responsible for and uses that initially to start the lot, but
sleeping. Checks back every so often to get status, so knows when
other processes are ready be woken up and run.
Various ways to do that, but an interesting design problem none the
less...
Not sure what you mean by internal priority list.
Some data file that specifies the dependencies and order in which the
various services are started up.
Post by Dan Espen
All of that info is in the .service files.
There's no hard coded logic about services in systemd.
I wouldn't expect it to. Minimally, all it needs is an ordered list of
processes and their dependencies.
It's not really an ordered list;
cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/nfs-server.service
[Unit]
Description=NFS server and services DefaultDependencies=no
Requires=network.target proc-fs-nfsd.mount Requires=nfs-mountd.service
Wants=rpcbind.socket network-online.target Wants=rpc-statd.service
nfs-idmapd.service Wants=rpc-statd-notify.service Wants=nfsdcld.service
After=network-online.target local-fs.target After=proc-fs-nfsd.mount
rpcbind.socket nfs-mountd.service After=nfs-idmapd.service
rpc-statd.service After=nfsdcld.service Before=rpc-statd-notify.service
# GSS services dependencies and ordering
Wants=auth-rpcgss-module.service After=rpc-gssd.service gssproxy.service
rpc-svcgssd.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot RemainAfterExit=yes ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd ExecStart=-/bin/sh -c 'if systemctl -q
is-active gssproxy; then systemctl reload gssproxy ; fi'
ExecStop=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd 0 ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -au
ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -f
ExecReload=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Notice how it declares what it requires, it's order, and what wants it.
Internally systemd creates a tree structure and works up and down the
tree as needed.
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at everything all
those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing and abstracted
it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a clean design
because each service has only 1 file with just a few entries being
needed for each service.
That's a different issue to the priority problem, which I understood
was one of the things that it was designed to address. Maybe not...
The .service files declare interdependence. (What you're calling
priority.)
No different on FreeBSD really (but without systemd!). A single script,
which also declares dependencies.
#!/bin/sh
# PROVIDE: nfsd
# REQUIRE: mountcritremote mountd hostname gssd nfsuserd
# KEYWORD: nojail shutdown
. /etc/rc.subr
name="nfsd"
desc="Remote NFS server"
rcvar="nfs_server_enable"
command="/usr/sbin/${name}"
Actually, that looks pretty good.
Still not as simple as one flat file full of keywords, but at least
the comments and variables convey some of the same info as systemd.
--
Dan Espen
Bob Eager
2020-09-09 12:43:21 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Bob Eager
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the colour
to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across the
screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random from a
distance, but look carefully to see the detail...
I believe I have 2 Solaris backgrounds in the root show.
The fishtank and 3d letters spelling SUN.
I mostly use xli (a version of xloadimage) and do the scaling during display.
Whatever, but getting back to systemd, was thinking about how it
works internally, since one of the problems it attempts to solve,
apparently, is the startup of various processes in the correct
order and with dependencies. For example, you don't want to start
up the ntp daemon before the networking stack is up and online.
That means it must have an internal priority list for the things
it's responsible for and uses that initially to start the lot, but
sleeping. Checks back every so often to get status, so knows when
other processes are ready be woken up and run.
Various ways to do that, but an interesting design problem none the
less...
Not sure what you mean by internal priority list.
Some data file that specifies the dependencies and order in which the
various services are started up.
Post by Dan Espen
All of that info is in the .service files.
There's no hard coded logic about services in systemd.
I wouldn't expect it to. Minimally, all it needs is an ordered list
of processes and their dependencies.
It's not really an ordered list;
cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/nfs-server.service
[Unit]
Description=NFS server and services DefaultDependencies=no
Requires=network.target proc-fs-nfsd.mount Requires=nfs-mountd.service
Wants=rpcbind.socket network-online.target Wants=rpc-statd.service
nfs-idmapd.service Wants=rpc-statd-notify.service
Wants=nfsdcld.service
After=network-online.target local-fs.target After=proc-fs-nfsd.mount
rpcbind.socket nfs-mountd.service After=nfs-idmapd.service
rpc-statd.service After=nfsdcld.service
Before=rpc-statd-notify.service
# GSS services dependencies and ordering
Wants=auth-rpcgss-module.service After=rpc-gssd.service
gssproxy.service rpc-svcgssd.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot RemainAfterExit=yes ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd ExecStart=-/bin/sh -c 'if systemctl -q
is-active gssproxy; then systemctl reload gssproxy ; fi'
ExecStop=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd 0 ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -au
ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -f
ExecReload=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Notice how it declares what it requires, it's order, and what wants it.
Internally systemd creates a tree structure and works up and down the
tree as needed.
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at everything all
those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing and
abstracted it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a
clean design because each service has only 1 file with just a few
entries being needed for each service.
That's a different issue to the priority problem, which I understood
was one of the things that it was designed to address. Maybe not...
The .service files declare interdependence. (What you're calling
priority.)
No different on FreeBSD really (but without systemd!). A single script,
which also declares dependencies.
#!/bin/sh
# PROVIDE: nfsd # REQUIRE: mountcritremote mountd hostname gssd
nfsuserd # KEYWORD: nojail shutdown
. /etc/rc.subr
name="nfsd"
desc="Remote NFS server"
rcvar="nfs_server_enable"
command="/usr/sbin/${name}"
Actually, that looks pretty good.
Still not as simple as one flat file full of keywords, but at least the
comments and variables convey some of the same info as systemd.
Packages that have daemons automatically install the file, and no editing
is required except for the one central file that enables it.
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Chris
2020-09-09 12:29:51 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
I always liked the old cde ankh pattern wallpaper on my old
workstations and use that to this day on the current Sol 10
machine. Scaled the pattern using gnu convert, changed the
colour to a cool green, restful to the eye and tiled that across
the screen. Thing is that the pattern looks almost random
from a distance, but look carefully to see the detail...
I believe I have 2 Solaris backgrounds in the root show.
The fishtank and 3d letters spelling SUN.
I mostly use xli (a version of xloadimage) and do the scaling during display.
Whatever, but getting back to systemd, was thinking about how it
works internally, since one of the problems it attempts to solve,
apparently, is the startup of various processes in the correct
order and with dependencies. For example, you don't want
to start up the ntp daemon before the networking stack
is up and online.
That means it must have an internal priority list for the
things it's responsible for and uses that initially to start
the lot, but sleeping. Checks back every so often to get
status, so knows when other processes are ready be woken up
and run.
Various ways to do that, but an interesting design problem
none the less...
Not sure what you mean by internal priority list.
Some data file that specifies the dependencies and order in
which the various services are started up.
Post by Dan Espen
All of that info is in the .service files.
There's no hard coded logic about services in systemd.
I wouldn't expect it to. Minimally, all it needs is an ordered
list of processes and their dependencies.
It's not really an ordered list;
Post by Chris
cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/nfs-server.service
[Unit]
Description=NFS server and services
DefaultDependencies=no
Requires=network.target proc-fs-nfsd.mount
Requires=nfs-mountd.service
Wants=rpcbind.socket network-online.target
Wants=rpc-statd.service nfs-idmapd.service
Wants=rpc-statd-notify.service
Wants=nfsdcld.service
After=network-online.target local-fs.target
After=proc-fs-nfsd.mount rpcbind.socket nfs-mountd.service
After=nfs-idmapd.service rpc-statd.service
After=nfsdcld.service
Before=rpc-statd-notify.service
# GSS services dependencies and ordering
Wants=auth-rpcgss-module.service
After=rpc-gssd.service gssproxy.service rpc-svcgssd.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd
ExecStart=-/bin/sh -c 'if systemctl -q is-active gssproxy; then systemctl reload gssproxy ; fi'
ExecStop=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd 0
ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -au
ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -f
ExecReload=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Notice how it declares what it requires, it's order, and what wants it.
Internally systemd creates a tree structure and works up and down the
tree as needed.
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at
everything all those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing
and abstracted it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a
clean design because each service has only 1 file with just a few
entries being needed for each service.
That's a different issue to the priority problem, which I understood
was one of the things that it was designed to address. Maybe not...
The .service files declare interdependence. (What you're calling
priority.)
I did find a brief description of the systemd internals here:

https://bpowers.net/weblog/2016/systemd-internals/

If that is clear to you, good luck :-).

It looks very complex for what it is and the syntax is very
wordy. Compare that with Bob's description of the FreeBSD startup
process, which looks quite clear and builds on what was already
there, not a completely new subsystem with it's fingers into
everything.

I had started to think yesterday that systemd might have some redeeming
features, but that has been corrected today...

Chris
Dan Espen
2020-09-09 12:44:44 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
https://bpowers.net/weblog/2016/systemd-internals/
If that is clear to you, good luck :-).
It's fairly clear.

It's not information that any user should need, it's a description
of some of the routines in systemd.
Post by Chris
It looks very complex for what it is and the syntax is very
wordy. Compare that with Bob's description of the FreeBSD startup
process, which looks quite clear and builds on what was already
there, not a completely new subsystem with it's fingers into
everything.
I had started to think yesterday that systemd might have some redeeming
features, but that has been corrected today...
I hope not by that information above.
It's irrelevant to anyone not trying to read the source code.

For systemd, you want to start with 'man systemd'.
That will lead you to lots of good stuff including a description
of the .service files in 'man systemd-system.conf'.
--
Dan Espen
Scott Lurndal
2020-09-09 18:31:57 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at
everything all those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing
and abstracted it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a
clean design because each service has only 1 file with just a few
entries being needed for each service.
That's a different issue to the priority problem, which I understood
was one of the things that it was designed to address. Maybe not...
The priority system was simple and effective using the standard
System V intialization scripts. They were executed in collating
order in the default C locale.

So S01xxxx would be started before S93yyyy.

the 'chkconfig' command would enable/disable services at the target runlevel.
(e.g. chkconfig network on)

The 'service' command would start/stop/restart services
(e.g. service network start).

Simple. Easy. Maintainable. Flexible. Independent.

chkconfig --list

shows all the services and the run-level they're enabled for.

chkconfig --list | grep ":on"

shows all enabled services


For systemd, you need
'systemctl list-unit-files'
which is completely unintuitive, and on my system has
384 unit files (which far more than the 20 or 30 services
managed on a typical system v init system); most of them
useless for everyday system management.
Dan Espen
2020-09-09 19:49:23 UTC
Permalink
Post by Scott Lurndal
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at
everything all those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing
and abstracted it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a
clean design because each service has only 1 file with just a few
entries being needed for each service.
That's a different issue to the priority problem, which I understood
was one of the things that it was designed to address. Maybe not...
The priority system was simple and effective using the standard
System V intialization scripts. They were executed in collating
order in the default C locale.
So S01xxxx would be started before S93yyyy.
the 'chkconfig' command would enable/disable services at the target runlevel.
(e.g. chkconfig network on)
The 'service' command would start/stop/restart services
(e.g. service network start).
Simple. Easy. Maintainable. Flexible. Independent.
chkconfig --list
shows all the services and the run-level they're enabled for.
chkconfig --list | grep ":on"
shows all enabled services
For systemd, you need
'systemctl list-unit-files'
which is completely unintuitive, and on my system has
384 unit files (which far more than the 20 or 30 services
managed on a typical system v init system); most of them
useless for everyday system management.
Wow, imagine 384 services numbered S00 to S99.

I've got 458.
--
Dan Espen
Niklas Karlsson
2020-09-09 20:41:03 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Scott Lurndal
For systemd, you need
'systemctl list-unit-files'
which is completely unintuitive, and on my system has
384 unit files (which far more than the 20 or 30 services
managed on a typical system v init system); most of them
useless for everyday system management.
Wow, imagine 384 services numbered S00 to S99.
I've got 458.
Fine, so use three digits.

Niklas
--
When you need a helpline for breakfast cereals, it's time to start
thinking about tearing down civilisation and giving the ants a go.
-- Chris King in asr
Dan Espen
2020-09-09 21:32:05 UTC
Permalink
Post by Niklas Karlsson
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Scott Lurndal
For systemd, you need
'systemctl list-unit-files'
which is completely unintuitive, and on my system has
384 unit files (which far more than the 20 or 30 services
managed on a typical system v init system); most of them
useless for everyday system management.
Wow, imagine 384 services numbered S00 to S99.
I've got 458.
Fine, so use three digits.
Have you ever tried to spread out 400 items using 3 digits
keeping enough gaps to be able to insert new items anywhere in
the sequence?

I think 4 digits is called for and some kind of automated
renumbering tool.
--
Dan Espen
Thomas Koenig
2020-09-10 05:17:08 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
I think 4 digits is called for and some kind of automated
renumbering tool.
Almost unrelated, but that reminds me - of the numerous tools that
floated around for the numerous rather crippeled BASIC dialects
that the home micros had, RENUMBER was rather popular.
gareth evans
2020-09-10 11:15:32 UTC
Permalink
Post by Thomas Koenig
Post by Dan Espen
I think 4 digits is called for and some kind of automated
renumbering tool.
Almost unrelated, but that reminds me - of the numerous tools that
floated around for the numerous rather crippeled BASIC dialects
that the home micros had, RENUMBER was rather popular.
RENUMBER had always been around in BASIC, certainly on the
PDPs 10 & 11.
Bob Eager
2020-09-10 11:51:02 UTC
Permalink
Post by Thomas Koenig
I think 4 digits is called for and some kind of automated renumbering
tool.
Almost unrelated, but that reminds me - of the numerous tools that
floated around for the numerous rather crippeled BASIC dialects that the
home micros had, RENUMBER was rather popular.
I remember writing a renumbering program back in 1971. For obscure
reasons (but good ones) I wrote it in assembler.
--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Chris
2020-09-10 13:40:19 UTC
Permalink
Post by Bob Eager
Post by Thomas Koenig
I think 4 digits is called for and some kind of automated renumbering
tool.
Almost unrelated, but that reminds me - of the numerous tools that
floated around for the numerous rather crippeled BASIC dialects that the
home micros had, RENUMBER was rather popular.
I remember writing a renumbering program back in 1971. For obscure
reasons (but good ones) I wrote it in assembler.
Years ago, late 70's, I wrote everything in asm, as even then the
compliers were expensive and often not very good...

Regards,

Chris
gareth evans
2020-09-10 16:39:55 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by Bob Eager
Post by Thomas Koenig
I think 4 digits is called for and some kind of automated renumbering
tool.
Almost unrelated, but that reminds me - of the numerous tools that
floated around for the numerous rather crippeled BASIC dialects that the
home micros had, RENUMBER was rather popular.
I remember writing a renumbering program back in 1971. For obscure
reasons (but good ones) I wrote it in assembler.
Years ago, late 70's, I wrote everything in asm, as even then the
compliers were expensive and often not very good...
Yes. Largely ASM on the PDP11 from 1971 till 1981, with a
short excursion into the ICI language RTL/2
Chris
2020-09-10 17:03:17 UTC
Permalink
Post by gareth evans
Post by Chris
Post by Bob Eager
Post by Thomas Koenig
I think 4 digits is called for and some kind of automated renumbering
tool.
Almost unrelated, but that reminds me - of the numerous tools that
floated around for the numerous rather crippeled BASIC dialects that the
home micros had, RENUMBER was rather popular.
I remember writing a renumbering program back in 1971. For obscure
reasons (but good ones) I wrote it in assembler.
Years ago, late 70's, I wrote everything in asm, as even then the
compliers were expensive and often not very good...
Yes. Largely ASM on the PDP11 from 1971 till 1981, with a
short excursion into the ICI language RTL/2
Originally from a electronics background and exposed to micros
in the mid 70's, but it was another few years before I got my
first machine. Felt like the start of a revolution, once I
realised what they were capable of,,,

Chris
Scott Lurndal
2020-09-10 15:45:55 UTC
Permalink
Post by Niklas Karlsson
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Scott Lurndal
For systemd, you need
'systemctl list-unit-files'
which is completely unintuitive, and on my system has
384 unit files (which far more than the 20 or 30 services
managed on a typical system v init system); most of them
useless for everyday system management.
Wow, imagine 384 services numbered S00 to S99.
I've got 458.
Fine, so use three digits.
Who needs 458 services?
Dan Espen
2020-09-10 16:02:02 UTC
Permalink
Post by Scott Lurndal
Post by Niklas Karlsson
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Scott Lurndal
For systemd, you need
'systemctl list-unit-files'
which is completely unintuitive, and on my system has
384 unit files (which far more than the 20 or 30 services
managed on a typical system v init system); most of them
useless for everyday system management.
Wow, imagine 384 services numbered S00 to S99.
I've got 458.
Fine, so use three digits.
Who needs 458 services?
Clearly no one.
But apparently I have 458 to choose from.

Here are all the ones starting with the letter "a":

me> systemctl list-unit-files 'a*'
UNIT FILE STATE VENDOR PRESET
abrt-journal-core.service enabled enabled
abrt-oops.service enabled enabled
abrt-pstoreoops.service disabled disabled
abrt-vmcore.service enabled enabled
abrt-xorg.service enabled enabled
abrtd.service enabled enabled
accounts-daemon.service enabled enabled
acpid.service disabled disabled
akmods-shutdown.service disabled disabled
akmods.service enabled enabled
***@.service disabled disabled
alsa-restore.service static disabled
alsa-state.service static disabled
anaconda-direct.service static disabled
anaconda-nm-config.service static disabled
anaconda-noshell.service static disabled
anaconda-pre.service static disabled
anaconda-***@.service static disabled
anaconda-sshd.service static disabled
anaconda-***@.service static disabled
anaconda.service static disabled
arp-ethers.service disabled disabled
atd.service enabled enabled
auditd.service enabled enabled
auth-rpcgss-module.service static disabled
autofs.service disabled disabled
***@.service enabled disabled
avahi-daemon.service enabled enabled
acpid.socket enabled disabled
avahi-daemon.socket enabled enabled
anaconda.target static disabled

31 unit files listed.


maybe you can identify the ones that no one should ever need.
--
Dan Espen
Chris
2020-09-10 16:35:50 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Scott Lurndal
Post by Niklas Karlsson
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Scott Lurndal
For systemd, you need
'systemctl list-unit-files'
which is completely unintuitive, and on my system has
384 unit files (which far more than the 20 or 30 services
managed on a typical system v init system); most of them
useless for everyday system management.
Wow, imagine 384 services numbered S00 to S99.
I've got 458.
Fine, so use three digits.
Who needs 458 services?
Clearly no one.
But apparently I have 458 to choose from.
me> systemctl list-unit-files 'a*'
UNIT FILE STATE VENDOR PRESET
abrt-journal-core.service enabled enabled
abrt-oops.service enabled enabled
abrt-pstoreoops.service disabled disabled
abrt-vmcore.service enabled enabled
abrt-xorg.service enabled enabled
abrtd.service enabled enabled
accounts-daemon.service enabled enabled
acpid.service disabled disabled
akmods-shutdown.service disabled disabled
akmods.service enabled enabled
alsa-restore.service static disabled
alsa-state.service static disabled
anaconda-direct.service static disabled
anaconda-nm-config.service static disabled
anaconda-noshell.service static disabled
anaconda-pre.service static disabled
anaconda-sshd.service static disabled
anaconda.service static disabled
arp-ethers.service disabled disabled
atd.service enabled enabled
auditd.service enabled enabled
auth-rpcgss-module.service static disabled
autofs.service disabled disabled
avahi-daemon.service enabled enabled
acpid.socket enabled disabled
avahi-daemon.socket enabled enabled
anaconda.target static disabled
31 unit files listed.
maybe you can identify the ones that no one should ever need.
One of the problems I have with Windoze is
trying to strip services down to a minimum set and
still be useful. Linux is going that way and
the primary reason I say Linux is bloatware. Typically,
pages and pages in the process list and for what ?.
Added offence from systemd, with it's complex design
and arcane syntax. Intellectual self abuse, or what ?.

Compare that with FreeBSD, xfce4 desktop, two terminal
windows open and top reports 51 processes, all in
less than 1Gb ram. About a page of A4.
If you are an engineer or techie, efficiency
matters and lean design is respected. Just one of the
reasons I dumped later Linux versions for good some
time ago. No longer really respect it...

Chris
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
2020-09-09 20:05:56 UTC
Permalink
On Wed, 09 Sep 2020 18:31:57 GMT
Post by Scott Lurndal
The priority system was simple and effective using the standard
System V intialization scripts. They were executed in collating
order in the default C locale.
That was one of the misfeatures in that dog's dinner of a design.
If you want to add a script you have to work out what name to give it based
on the ordering you want. If a dependency changes you may have to rename
your script.
Post by Scott Lurndal
So S01xxxx would be started before S93yyyy.
Don't forget the K scripts running in the opposite order at level
exit time.
Post by Scott Lurndal
the 'chkconfig' command would enable/disable services at the target
runlevel. (e.g. chkconfig network on)
Runlevels - that was another, an inelegant solution to a
non-problem.

When FreeBSD moved off a single rc script and added rc.d I feared
Post by Scott Lurndal
Simple. Easy. Maintainable. Flexible. Independent.
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
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Peter Flass
2020-09-09 23:55:56 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at
everything all those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing
and abstracted it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a
clean design because each service has only 1 file with just a few
entries being needed for each service.
At PPOE we had a guy who did something similar for zOS startup. He wrote a
program that read a control file and issued commands to start services in
sequence, including timed waits and appropriate replies to console
messages.
--
Pete
Scott Lurndal
2020-09-10 15:48:22 UTC
Permalink
Post by Peter Flass
Post by Dan Espen
In short what the systemd developers did was look at
everything all those custom designed scripts and soft links were doing
and abstracted it all into the .service files. You can tell it's a
clean design because each service has only 1 file with just a few
entries being needed for each service.
At PPOE we had a guy who did something similar for zOS startup. He wrote a
program that read a control file and issued commands to start services in
sequence, including timed waits and appropriate replies to console
messages.
Burroughs MCP had a SYSUP option. If the option was set, the MCP would
execute a program called SYSUP when Halt/Loaded. It was often used to
initialize the datacomm subsystems and start GEMCOS/SWITCH for the
datacomm station handling (e.g. transaction processing).
Scott Lurndal
2020-09-08 15:38:10 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
1. Reduce boot time dramatically
Not a problem when you boot once a decade, which is
true of most servers (and in my case, desktop systems).

$ uptime
08:36:30 up 686 days, 20:43, 24 users, load average: 0.23, 0.16, 0.16
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
2. Reduce shut down time the same way
Had never been a problem. Push the button and walk away.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
3. Manage running services in case a device is plugged in or has a
problem and needs to restart
'service', 'chkconfig' and udev worked just fine for that, long before
systemd.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Post by Dan Espen
4. Finally make the relationships between running services clear
That should be a function of the services (sys v init handled this
just fine with a simple two-digit number.

The worst thing about systemd is that it completely violates the unix
philosophy of small, self-contained applications.

And it's just getting worse, taking over DNS and other run-time
services which it has no business being involved in.
Post by Dan Espen
Post by Chris
Won't get involved in wars, as I do use both and both work, though
all Linux here is pre systemd, or devuan.
However, from a software engineering point of FreeBSD looks far
more lean in it's design and has other advantages, such as a native
zfs file system and yes, no systemd.
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by
Sun Microsystems. ZFS is scalable, and includes extensive protection
against data corruption, support for high storage capacities,
It is an enterprise level filesystem.
Post by Dan Espen
I was just reading about Fedora's new file system, XFS.
Hardly new. SGI ported XFS (another enterprise level
filesystem) to linux 20 years ago.
Post by Dan Espen
I'm not facing any issues with ext4 though.
For Fedora, I didn't like or need LVM so I turned it off.
I don't need or like systemd. Unfortunately, Fedora
and the server side (RHEL & derivatives) don't let you
turn it off.
Questor
2020-09-08 02:29:50 UTC
Permalink
Re: Where did Microsoft go wrong?
Perhaps the answer lies within one of these:

Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End
of the Microsoft Era
-- John Heilemann

Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft
-- David Bank
Chris
2020-09-08 16:53:20 UTC
Permalink
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Pulling it back on topic :-)...

I wouldn't touch Wimdoze 10 with yours, if you will excuse the
expression and we have just one win7 desktop in the house, on
a separate subnet. Use the server version for the lab desktop,
only upgrading to 2008 from 2003 last year, when it became old
enough to be affordable on Ebay. Still getting updates as well,
but ignore much of that.

What I do like about ws2008 (~win 7) is that all services other
than essential are turned off by default and have to be enabled.
They also did a fair job with the system management tools as
well, though the myriad of options takes time to wade through.
Finally, there's an nfs client included, that just needs to be
enabled. Server as well if you need it. An essential since the
lab server and much else are all unix or variant. Much better
os than any of the home user versions...

Chris
J. Clarke
2020-09-08 21:43:10 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris
Post by gareth evans
With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft
provided products to help you control your computer, but
with W10 they are trying to control the way you use the
computer.
W10 is increasingly pissing me off and the next PC
I buy will be LINUX based.
So, just before my 35th year of being a Microsoft
customer and user, they have finally succeeded in
driving me away.
Pulling it back on topic :-)...
I wouldn't touch Wimdoze 10 with yours, if you will excuse the
expression and we have just one win7 desktop in the house, on
a separate subnet. Use the server version for the lab desktop,
only upgrading to 2008 from 2003 last year, when it became old
enough to be affordable on Ebay. Still getting updates as well,
but ignore much of that.
Careful with that "old enough to be affordable on ebay". The key is
often already in use and has sometimes been resold repeatedly,
resulting in Microsoft blocking it. This may occur even after you
have installed and activated the OS.
Post by Chris
What I do like about ws2008 (~win 7) is that all services other
than essential are turned off by default and have to be enabled.
They also did a fair job with the system management tools as
well, though the myriad of options takes time to wade through.
Finally, there's an nfs client included, that just needs to be
enabled. Server as well if you need it. An essential since the
lab server and much else are all unix or variant. Much better
os than any of the home user versions...
Chris
Chris
2020-09-08 22:00:59 UTC
Permalink
On 09/08/20 22:43, J. Clarke wrote:

That did happen, but complained and was sent another key, which is
working to this day. Windows is only here on sufferance anyway, for
a few legacy apps...

Chris
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