Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 1, 2016 16:32 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Devuan Jessie beta released by jaromil
Parent article: Devuan Jessie beta released

> For instance, the security implications of systemd are huge.

You're going to have to qualify this...

(From my own understanding, at worst systemd is no worse than the legacy sysvinit model, and typically fares better due to exposing a smaller attack surface)

> As well its impact on embedded development.

Dunno; I've gone on record several times in the past saying that if systemd had been available when I was building BSPs for access points and whatnot, it would have saved my employer a couple of man-years of effort compared to us having to invent (and maintain) our own wheels.

Beyond that, 'embedded' means a lot of things these days, many of which are far larger and complex than a desktop from a decade ago. Heck, systemd is even in cars now.

> To not even mention enterprise dynamics like the one described here [ snipped reddit url ]

I'm sorry, but a random reddit poster cannot speak for the enterprisey world, especially when he does not appear to understand how enterprise operating systems are actually chosen.

Nobody pays money for RHEL unless they need to -- The OS is chosen to support the applications, not the other way around (presuming commodity hardware, anyway). For example, my employer uses RHEL because the upper-five-digits-per-seat-per-year EDA tools they utilize are only supported by their vendors on a specific version of RHEL.

The purchase price for the hardware, the OS license, and even the sysadmin costs are insignificant when one considers that our yearly licensing costs for our local office (20ish engineers) were in excess of 2 million USD a couple years back.

> So well, back to Devuan, even if we fail at making a universal base distribution, we'll have at least satisfied our own needs with a base distribution we can rely on to do our work.

That's the beauty of Free Software. I'm glad it's working well for what you need!

to post comments

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 1, 2016 17:13 UTC (Sun) by jaromil (guest, #97970) [Link] (3 responses)

> You're going to have to qualify this...

no, I don't 'have to' write anything I don't want to write, especially considering I have no time for it.

>> As well its impact on embedded development.
>Dunno;

I do, having worked on embedded system for more than 10 years now. systemd is clearly impacting uclibc and musl.

>> To not even mention enterprise dynamics like the one described here
>I'm sorry, but a random reddit poster cannot speak for the enterprisey world

Sorry, but then what am I doing here, speaking to a random LWN poster called 'pizza'?

> That's the beauty of Free Software. I'm glad it's working well for what you need!

Nono, no kumbaya yet my friend. We have to work hard to avoid an imposition and a limitation of our freedom.

What is happening is not the "beauty of Free Software", but a last-chance catch by the safety belt of FSF licensing.

Now I'm sorry but I don't have more time to follow this conversation. Ciao.

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 1, 2016 18:53 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> no, I don't 'have to' write anything I don't want to write, especially considering I have no time for it.

Okay, but if you're going to make assertions, it's up you to support them with at least anectodal evidence.

Ciao, indeed.

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 1, 2016 20:39 UTC (Sun) by bronson (guest, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

This is a disappointing response. Back in the oughts I spent some time working on embedded Linux set-top boxes. The number of workarounds we had to stick in our init scripts just to get a sub-1-minute boot time was out of hand. I can only imagine how much easier it would have been with systemd.

So, I was looking forward to hearing nonobvious ways that systemd makes embedded harder. Except in extremely memory-constrained environments (which tend to use hand rolled rc scripts anyway), it seems like a clear win to me.

I hope you'll explain your evidence at some point. I'm still curious.

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 1, 2016 21:31 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> So, I was looking forward to hearing nonobvious ways that systemd makes embedded harder. Except in extremely memory-constrained environments (which tend to use hand rolled rc scripts anyway), it seems like a clear win to me.

I too was interested in this, as my experience was remarkably similar to yours.

Incidentally, classic rc scripts turned out to be pretty bad memory-wise too; we had to do a lot of custom coding to ensure we didn't spawn too many things at once. We actually integrated some extra stuff into busybox to save memory (and yes, delivered the complete corresponding source code as per the GPL). As it turned out this also greatly sped up boot times by eliminating much shell script parsing and many forks that were now all handled internally to busybox's shell. The price was a slightly higher baseline idle memory usage, well worth the effort.

We also had to play (not always successful) games to capture console logging, had to write our own service status/monitoring/respawning tools, had endless fun trying to ensure clean shutdowns so we could perform firmware upgrades, and yes, even had to modify a few daemons so that they would properly detach from the console or otherwise behave better. Oh, and handle dynamic events, restarting/reinitializing whatever services were affected (of course, respecting all dependencies) depending on which operational mode we were in.

Systemd wouldn't have necessarily solved all of these issues for us -- we'd still have had to dynamically generate a set of unit files based on the system configuration (aka our own "business logic") but we wouldn't have had to [re-]invent and maintain so much low-level infrastructure.

Then again, the fact that this stuff was so complicated is what kept us in business... so maybe it's a good thing that systemd didn't come along until well after the company shut down.