[ale] Changing Linux

[Lightner, Jeff]

Having worked on multiple variants of UNIX (including BSD) and Linux what I can say is NOTHING is the same "everywhere" even if it is all "mostly" the same.   There was similar gnashing of teeth when many UNIX variants started abandoning Berkley (the basis for BSD) in favor of System V.   The most ungodly setup for that was Solaris where you had paths to BOTH System V utilities AND their Berkley counterparts wherein the flags were often quite different.   Almost none of the UNIX variants used the same administration tools nor did they necessarily approach things like disks the same way.   Solaris was big on Solstice Disk Suite (what an abomination) whereas HP-UX used LVM and both eventually allowed and encouraged use of Veritas Volume Manager (except possibly for boot/root).

Linux is a different animal from UNIX even though there are lots of similarities.   Pretending it always did things the "UNIX" way is specious at best.   One only has to look at top load averages exceeding 1 x # of CPUs to understand that.   I never met a UNIX system that wasn't starting to have performance issues at that level and all but locked up at 2 x # of CPUs but on Linux I've seen systems swimming along fine with load averages of 35 or higher for 2 CPU cores.





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Ted W
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2014 3:28 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Changing Linux

On 09/26/14 14:21, David Jackson wrote:
> Hi guys.
>
> So, not to start a holy war or anything, but how does the notion of systemd and journald startups reconcile with the long-standing UNIX tradition of simplicity and high reliability?  Of using simple text files and daemons that can die or hang without bringing down the entire system?
>
>
> Mind you, I'm just coming back to Linux after a long lay off, so I've missed a lot of these discussions that you all probably have been having over these years.  If Debian is using systemd now, and they're still as "free" and "traditional" as they always were, I must be missing quite a bit by parachuting into the middle of all this.  BTW, I'm not finding systemd on my Slackware 14.1 system.
>
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Dave
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My biggest gripe about it would have to be it's incompatibility with the other Unix clones out there. Systemd is very much a Linux thing. It does not, and probably will not, run on any of the BSDs. There has been some work from OpenBSD to get some form of it working but Theo came out on the mailing list the other day and basically stated that there were no plans to officially support such an implementation now or in to the forseeable future.

Since I administer both Linux and BSD systems this all means that I now have to get familiar with two different init systems with no option to run Systemd on all of them, even if I do end up liking it better which, from what I've read so far seems I may end up doing once the political cat fight around it calms down somewhat.

--
Ted W. <ted at xy0.org>
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