[CentOS] Some thoughts on systemd

Timothy Murphy

gayleard at alice.it
Thu Jul 17 15:27:36 UTC 2014


I haven't had any problems with systemd.
However, I didn't have any problems with sysVinit over many years.

But the only practical advantage of systemd that I've seen touted
is that it speeds up boot-time.
Even if this were true it does not seem to me worth worrying about,
as - in my case at least - the frequency of re-booting is so low
that even if it took twice as long it would still be
a negligible fraction of my time.

In fact I've been running CentOS-6.5 and CentOS-7 off and on
for the last few days, and I have found no difference in boot-time.
It takes my HP MicroServer 80 seconds to reboot and login,
and at least 65 seconds of this is taken up
with messages from HP's BIOS, checking USB devices or ports,
checking PXE devices (I know I could probably turn this off),
and starting up KDE.

So I find this particular argument for systemd null and void.

As far as I can see, the other reason for favouring systemd
is more philosophical, and is based on the idea
that the many different start-up routines
share a considerable amount of common code,
and that it is good to take out this code
and put it in a separate process.
That seems to me a good Unix-like argument.

In principle this should simplify the algorithms involved.
But it seems to me that the way in which it has been implemented
has in fact increased the complication rather than the reverse.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland





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