Say Something Nice About systemd

ewhac writes: I'm probably going to deeply deeply regret this, but every time a story appears here mentioning systemd, a 700-comment thread of back-and-forth bickering breaks out which is about as informative as an old Bud Light commercial, and I don't really learn anything new about the subject. My gut reaction to systemd is (currently) a negative one, and it's very easy to find screeds decrying systemd on the net. However, said screeds haven't been enough to prevent its adoption by several distros, which leads me to suspect that maybe there's something worthwhile there that I haven't discovered yet. So I thought it might be instructive to turn the question around and ask the membership about what makes systemd good. However, before you stab at the "Post" button, there are some rules...

Bias Disclosure: I currently dislike systemd because — without diving very deeply into the documentation, mind — it looks and feels like a poorly-described, gigantic mess I know nothing about that seeks to replace other poorly-described, smaller messes which I know a little bit about. So you will be arguing in that environment.

Nice Things About systemd Rules:

1. Post each new Nice Thing as a new post, not as a reply to another post. This will let visitors skim the base level of comments for things that interest them, rather than have to dive through a fractally expanding tree of comments looking for things to support/oppose. It will also make it easier to follow the next rule:
2. Avoid duplication; read the entire base-level of comments before adding a new Nice Thing. Someone may already have mentioned your Nice Thing. Add your support/opposition to that Nice Thing there, rather than as a new post.
3. Only one concrete Nice Thing about systemd per base-level post. Keep the post focused on a single Nice Thing systemd does. If you know of multiple distinct things, write multiple distinct posts.
4. Describe the Nice Thing in some detail. Don't assume, for example, that merely saying "Supports Linux cgroups" will be immediately persuasive.
5. Describe how the Nice Thing is better than existing, less controversial solutions. systemd is allegedly better at some things than sysvinit or upstart or inetd. Why? Why is the Nice Thing possible in systemd, and impossible (or extremely difficult) with anything else? (In some cases, the Nice Thing will be a completely new thing that's never existed before; describe why it's good thing.)

Bonus points are awarded for:

• Personal Experience. "I actually did this," counts for way more than, "The docs claim you can do this."
• Working Examples. Corollary to the above — if you did a Nice Thing with systemd, consider also posting the code/script/service file you wrote to accomplish it.
• Links to Supporting Documentation. If you leveraged a Nice Thing, furnish a link to the docs you used that describe the Nice Thing and its usage.

We will assume out of the gate that systemd boots your system faster than ${SOMETHING_ELSE}, so no points for bringing that up.

Journald automatic stderr/stdout to syslog

[Wonko the Sane]

As someone who tries to stay involved with bleeding edge of Bitcoin/Freenet/I2P/associated tech, I run a lot of "weird" daemons that don't conform to standard Unix conventions, don't have support, and may even be a single GitHub repository that has been abandoned.

Needless to say, things like like syslog support aren't always available, but I frequently can get the daemons to log to stdout.

I hate having to search through random log files scattered throughout the filesystem, so the ability of journald to auto

Re:

[ewhac]

That's exactly the sort of thing I hoped to hear about.

Re:

[Wonko the Sane]

One thing journald doesn't do that I wish it would is to allow me to set something a logfile= parameter or something like that in the service file that would do a "tail -F | logger" on that file and feed it into the journal

I have to do that manually right now for daemons that refuse to log either to syslog or to the console.

Systemd Speed

[mrutherford]

Although I don't really agree with the more philosophical/design aspects and implementations of systemd, I will say that it HAS decreased my boot time considerably. I know it wasn't designed for speed, but it sure feels like it sometimes.