blog/data/2010-05-13-systemd.txt

   1 Title: systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart
   2 Tags: english, debian
   3 Date: 2010-05-13 22:10
   4
   5 <p>The last few days a new boot system called
   6 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
   7 has been
   8 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
   9 to the free software world.
  10 I have not yet had time to play around with it, but it seem to be a
  11 very interesting alternative to upstart, and might prove to be a good
  12 alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event based
  13 boot system.  Tollef is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the
  14 process</a> of getting systemd into Debian, and I look forward to
  15 seeing how well it work.  I like the fact that systemd handles init.d
  16 scripts with dependency information natively, allowing them to run in
  17 parallel where upstart at the moment do not.</p>
  18
  19 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
  20 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
  21 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
  22 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
  23 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
  24 way forward.</p>
  25
  26 <p>In the mean time, based on the input on debian-devel@ regarding
  27 parallel booting in Debian, I have decided to enable full parallel
  28 booting as the default in Debian as soon as possible (probably this
  29 weekend or early next week), to see if there are any remaining serious
  30 bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A new version of the sysvinit
  31 package implementing this change is already in experimental.  If all
  32 go well, Squeeze will be released with parallel booting enabled by
  33 default.</p>