[CentOS] Cemtos 7 : Systemd alternatives ?

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 08.07.2014 15:22, Steve Clark wrote:
> On 07/08/2014 08:09 AM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
>> On 08.07.2014 13:57, Scott Robbins wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 06:50:21PM -0700, Russell Miller wrote:
>>>> On Jul 7, 2014, at 6:34 PM, Scott Robbins<scottro at nyc.rr.com>  wrote:
>>>>> No systemd in FreeBSD.  It isn't Linux, and like any O/S, has its own
>>>>> oddities.
>>>>>
>>>>> It would take more adjustment, IMHO, to go from CentOS 6.x to
>>>>> FreeBSD than
>>>>> to go to 7.x.  (I'm saying this as someone who uses both FreeBSD and
>>>>> Fedora which has given a hint of what we'll see in CentOS 7.)
>>>>>
>>>> That's a good point.  Systemd may be the "abomination of desolation"
>>>> that
>>>> causes me to finally start moving to a BSD variant.  Or at least
>>>> start looking at one.
>>> Y'know, I was considered a troll when I said on Fedora forums that
>>> systemd
>>> going into server systems might start driving people away from RH to the
>>> BSDs.  (And to be honest, I was being trollish there, in a friendly
>>> way--in
>>> the same way at work I'll say something about Arch loudly enough for our
>>> Arch lover to hear.)
>>>
>>> Now that it's insinuated itself in the RHEL system, I do wonder if it is
>>> going to start driving people away.  In many ways, IMHO, RH has
>>> become the
>>> Windows of Linux, with no serious competitors, at least here in the US.
>>> Sure, some companies use something else, but when I had to job hunt last
>>> year, 90-95 percent of the Linux admin jobs were for
>>> RedHat/CentOS/OEL/SL
>>> admins.
>> That presumes that your conservative attitude is the majority opinion
>> though. Systemd is one of the features that I have been looking forward
>> to in CentOS 7 because of the new capabilities it provides so while this
>> will surely drive some people away it will actually attract others and
>> if you think that this will lead to some sort of great exodus then I
>> think you are mistaken. Not everybody is this uncomfortable with change.
>>
>> Regards,
>>    Dennis
> 
> My concern it that it is a massive change with a large footprint. How
> secure is it really? It has arguably become
> the second kernel it touches and handles so many things.

I agree but that is a change that you actively have to opt into though.
CentOS 6 will receive updates for many years to come so you don't have
to immediately migrate everything over in a rush. Also systemd is hardly
new at this point. It has been available for years and had quite some
time to mature. Red Hat would not have made it the core of its
"Enterprise" OS if it didn't think it would be very reliable.

> Maybe on desktops it makes sense - but I fail to see any positives for
> servers that once started run for months at a time
> between reboots.

The ability to jail services and restrict it's resources is one big plus
for me. Also the switch from messy bash scripts to a declarative
configuration makes things easier once you get used to the syntax.
Then there is the fact that services are actually monitored and can be
restarted automatically if they fail/crash and they run in a sane
environment where stdout is redirected into the journal so that all
output is caught which can be useful for debugging.

Its certainly a change one needs to get used to but as mentioned above I
don't think its a bad change and you don't have to jump to it
immediately if you don't want to.

Regards,
  Dennis