How is FreeBSD coping with a systemd future?

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drhowarddrfine said:
@pkubaj, you are confusing market share with "number of people who have moved to FreeBSD". There are tons of ex-Windows users who want a free ride and have jumped on the Linux band wagon now that there are easier to install distros. Let Linux have 'em. That takes nothing away from the scores of people I see every day coming to FreeBSD boards/forums/subreddits who say, "I'm coming from Linux cause I'm sick of [insert systemd, fragmenting, etc.]"; something I had rarely seen until the past year or so which is the point I made earlier. These are generally not people who are just looking for a Windows replacement.

There are also a ton of ex-Windows users who have found that the web world has gone mobile and Microsoft does not exist in that arena so it's far more natural to switch to a Unix-like system. All their friends are on Linux so that's where they go without technical consideration. I'll pat myself on the back for giving that some thought 10 years ago when my brother-in-law, a manager of a large Microsoft shop, told me to use Linux for my business. Instead, I gave it some thought and went for what I considered to be the better technical choice and signed up for FreeBSD.

I have never regreted that choice.
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FreeBSD's market share alone isn't a measure of a number of people who have moved to FreeBSD, but its difference with FreeBSD's market share from a year before is. And the fact is that in 2009 0.01% of desktop users used FreeBSD, and now, since FreeBSD doesn't appear in statistics, there are less. There's a catch though, because it's not a number of people but percentage, so the number of users is probably larger than in 2009, but, since new users are less than 0.01% of all new computer users, the overall percentage is smaller.
I think FreeBSD will survive anyway, OpenBSD has much smaller market share but it's still here. I can see FreeBSD's development is speeding up, since at 9.0 it was much more behind Linux in many areas (not only desktop but also virtualization etc.).
 
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What you are talking about still has nothing to do with what I said, and the rest of your post is wrong, but I will leave you with that and won't comment further.

btw, mods, shouldn't this be in the off-topic area? systemd has nothing to do with FreeBSD.
 
By the way, taking FreeBSD or any other BSD for a spin and studying it doesn't mean suddenly system administrators are leaving Linux kernel behind and becoming refugee. There are way many options in the Linux world *still*. Slackware with their sysvinit and CentOS 6.x are not going anywhere for next *couple* of years and a regular system admin will weigh everything down before jumping the ship. Sure, I like my logs files in text format but we'll see.

Dear drhowarddrfine made a claim in some another thread of *huge number of* gamers coming to FreeBSD looking for an alternate, I'm still not sure what does that even mean and where's the data to back that claim? How does that even matter for a gamer if its systemd or BSD style rc scripts in the background, if his/her games are available and working fine? (Please spare me the PS4 having some sort of customized FreeBSD argument, that's not desktop gaming)

Regards.
 
CurlyTheStooge said:
By the way, taking FreeBSD or any other BSD for a spin and studying it doesn't mean suddenly system administrators are leaving Linux kernel behind and becoming refugee. There are way many options in the Linux world *still*. Slackware with their sysvinit and CentOS 6.x are not going anywhere for next *couple* of years and a regular system admin will weigh everything down before jumping the ship. Sure, I like my logs files in text format but we'll see.

Dear drhowarddrfine made a claim in some another thread of *huge number of* gamers coming to FreeBSD looking for an alternate, I'm still not sure what does that even mean and where's the data to back that claim? How does that even matter for a gamer if its systemd or BSD style rc scripts in the background, if his/her games are available and working fine? (Please spare me the PS4 having some sort of customized FreeBSD argument, that's not desktop gaming)

Regards.
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There are still some distros that use traditional init, and it's not only Slackware are CentOS 6. There's also CRUX and Gentoo doesn't use systemd by default and even when it's default, like in Debian 8, there are options to switch to something else (https://wiki.debian.org/OpenRC).
 
pkubaj said:
There are still some distros that use traditional init, and it's not only Slackware are CentOS 6. There's also CRUX and Gentoo doesn't use systemd by default and even when it's default, like in Debian 8, there are options to switch to something else (https://wiki.debian.org/OpenRC).
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That's exactly my point. I quoted the distors which I use on daily basis and will keep using in foreseeable future. I'm not following Gentoo at this moment but I know their developers are working on a replacement of Udev, eudev or that's extracted udev.

Regards.
 
Gamers are not going to care whether the system uses systemd or not, if it works they will use it to play games. If it doesn't, it's going to the trash bin. Simple as that. You wonder why OS X has recently become a very viable gaming platform? Make a guess (and no the answer is not launchd alone).
 
kpa said:
... (and no the answer is not launchd alone).
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Comparing launchd with systemd is like comparing apples with penguins.

launchd restricts itself to the mere task of launching processes and maintaining these running, and the processes do not need any interface to launchd, and continue to not need to know by whom they were launched.

systemd wants to be the super-controller of everything what's running while running, and it expects "well behaved" processes communicating their status with it.

launchd is slim, systemd is bloated and carcinogen.
 
obsigna said:
kpa said:
... (and no the answer is not launchd alone).
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Comparing launchd with systemd is like comparing apples with penguins.

launchd restricts itself to the mere task of launching processes and maintaining these running, and the processes do not need any interface to launchd, and continue to not need to know by whom they were launched.

systemd wants to be the super-controller of everything what's running while running, and it expects "well behaved" processes communicating their status with it.

launchd is slim, systemd is bloated and carcinogen.
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I was predicting someone would make that comparison (or rush to tell everybody how wrong it is) if I start talking about OS X, hence my remark. Hook line and sinker :OO
 
CurlyTheStooge said:
Dear drhowarddrfine made a claim in some another thread of *huge number of* gamers coming to FreeBSD looking for an alternate, I'm still not sure what does that even mean and where's the data to back that claim?
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I made no such claim. I said gamers and Windows users were moving to Linux. I also said Linux users were moving to FreeBSD, not just "taking it for a spin". viewtopic.php?f=3&t=46667&p=267702#p266926 and others
 
drhowarddrfine said:
CurlyTheStooge said:
Dear drhowarddrfine made a claim in some another thread of *huge number of* gamers coming to FreeBSD looking for an alternate, I'm still not sure what does that even mean and where's the data to back that claim?
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I made no such claim. I said gamers and Windows users were moving to Linux. I also said Linux users were moving to FreeBSD, not just "taking it for a spin". viewtopic.php?f=3&t=46667&p=267702#p266926 and others
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I meant this thread and this post :-
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=47858#p267518

I resisted my self from commenting off topic there for some reason. I don't understand why would a Linux gamer be looking for and what in BSD world considering they are Linux gamers and are aware of all the ground realities of open source gaming?

Regards.
 
Even in that post I said most were sysadmins and that, yes, unfortunately some gamers were taking FreeBSD "for a test spin", as you said, but my point is there are a lot of people moving to FreeBSD from Linux over the systemd thing.
 
uzsolt said:
http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/gsoc2014.html#systemd
https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/pro ... 4879778816
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On the one side it is good that it seems to be possible to have some shims to come around this. But on the other hand - that does not make it OK! Simply being able to work around it is not the solution for this. Good to know that, if needed, it can be done. But it will always be a race after the next thing that is cooked up "over there".
 
userlessd (see http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/) is a fork of systemd without some of the controversial features.

What version of systemd is uselessd based on?

systemd-208-stable. We chose this, because it predates kdbus integration into PID1, the sd-bus API, networkd and a whole host of other cruft that has been growing quite profusely since then. Most baffling has been the recent inclusion of prerequisites for moving in kmscon, as well as the addition of a graphics card device access layer.
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And

What is this about FreeBSD you say?

uselessd is planned to work as a primitive stage 2 init (process manager) on FreeBSD. Stage 1 is inherently unportable requires a total overhaul in regards to low-level system logic (with systemd assuming lots of mount points and virtual file systems that aren’t present, is designed with an initramfs in mind and many other things). Stage 3 can always be achieved by having a sloppy shim around the standard tools like shutdown, halt, poweroff, etc.
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That's better than nothing I guess :OOO
 
ctaranotte said:
userlessd (see http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/) is a fork of systemd without some of the controversial features.

What version of systemd is uselessd based on?

systemd-208-stable. We chose this, because it predates kdbus integration into PID1, the sd-bus API, networkd and a whole host of other cruft that has been growing quite profusely since then. Most baffling has been the recent inclusion of prerequisites for moving in kmscon, as well as the addition of a graphics card device access layer.
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...
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(Emphasis mine) Holy FSCK. In about 2 years from now, systemd will be a quite usable operating system. It will only lack a decent init system. Maybe the emacs folks could provide these chaps with a nice init.elc file? Seriously, that thing will collapse into a /dev/blackhole soon.

And I have to agree to @vermaden, no matter where you fork this - it is still wrong. You may end up fixing some of the dependencies, but sooner than later some dependencies will come around which need the latest "cool thing" from systemd. And then all this starts again. I was "impressed" when I checked what bash did on my system and who thinks that depending on a shell as a run-time dependency was a good idea.

My vote in this matter would be, when we look at the original question : avoid it, lobby upstream to avoid dependencies, provide solutions to the rest of the open source landscape. Should there be a GSOC project porting devd to Linux? Why not? It could be interesting. But fight it, in the name of sane software design.
 
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Crivens said:
Maybe the emacs folks could provide these chaps with a nice init.elc file?
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I grasp that this is tongue-in-cheek, but why state your disdain for apples when we're talking about oranges? In the case of Emacs, no one is forcing anything down our throats. There are no forced dependencies on CUPS, D-BUS, HAL or PulseAudio and when it's released there is no major porting process because it just works on FreeBSD.

Edit: Minor updates without changing meaning
 
jrm said:
Crivens said:
Maybe the emacs folks could provide these chaps with a nice init.elc file?
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I grasp that this is tongue-in-cheek, but why state your disdain for apples when we're talking about oranges? In the case of Emacs, no one is forcing anything down our throats. There are no forced dependencies on CUPS, D-BUS, HAL or PulseAudio and when it's released there is no major porting process because it just works on FreeBSD.
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The point with emacs was the old joke about /vmunix.elc, pointing at the excessive feature set of emacs. The only bad thing about emacs I can now remember is the dropping of ctrl-alt-backspace as X11 killswitch due to being pressed by emacs users by accident. I do not use emacs myself as I think it will need a lot of efford to get it tuned to my taste. But I tip my hat to those who use emacs on a regular base and who have invested the time to learn it. Also, I do not think that the design of emacs suffered with the growing feature set - and that is something that might be a problem to come for systemd and Linux.
 
Actually, I thought the joke was aimed at the old statement
Emacs is a great operating system. If only it had a decent text editor
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And while not relevant here, the other one that used to make me laugh
I tried to learn emacs but then decided to learn a simpler operating system
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vermaden said:
ctaranotte said:
there are some good ideas on virtualization in systemd.

Just read the statement of the devs behind usslessd.
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Which part?
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+1 :PP I extensively tested Red Hat 7 and my final verdict is that if vendor support for FreeBSD get just little bit better you will see massive exodus of enterprise users from Linux to FreeBSD. Porting HAMMER and getting bhyve production ready will nail it for FreeBSD. Now tell us little bit about Dockers aka Jails which FreeBSD has circa 2000 and non functional OpenLMI and PCP crap.
 
Oko said:
Now tell us little bit about Dockers aka Jails which FreeBSD has circa 2000 and non functional OpenLMI and PCP crap.
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No, Docker is not a.k.a jails. Jails are comparable to LXC. Docker is "comparable" to ezjails. And if we do want to attract the enterprise users, some terms and comparisons then have to be used properly. Because then you'll see that Docker is far more advanced than anything FreeBSD has got right now. :beergrin
 
AzaShog said:
Oko said:
Now tell us little bit about Dockers aka Jails which FreeBSD has circa 2000 and non functional OpenLMI and PCP crap.
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No, Docker is not a.k.a jails. Jails are comparable to LXC. Docker is "comparable" to ezjails. And if we do want to attract the enterprise users, some terms and comparisons then have to be used properly. Because then you'll see that Docker is far more advanced than anything FreeBSD has got right now. :beergrin
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Ok Docker is not a Jail it is a Linux version of Warden which was introduced 5 years ago in PC-BSD and now has matured in CLI tool for TrueOS. That doesn't change the fact that Linux is getting LXC 20 years after Solaris had zones and 14 years after BSD had Jails. Which technology you think I am going to trust :q
 
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