[CentOS] C7, systemd, say what?!

Wed Jun 7 15:43:22 UTC 2017
Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com>

On Jun 7, 2017, at 9:31 AM, Mark Haney <mark.haney at neonova.net> wrote:
> 
> On 06/07/2017 11:24 AM, James Hogarth wrote:
>> 
>> Mark stop with the flame baiting please.
>> 
>> This is nothing systemd specific - and keep in mind /var/tmp is a
>> persistent temp area unlike /tmp which as it's tmpfs by default is of
>> course emptie don boot.
> I would wholeheartedly disagree.  This IS something systemd specific.

I’m sure James Hogarth meant that circular symlink chains are a problem for any program, not just for systemd.

Now if you can show that systemd *generated* this chain, you might have a point.

Since we have only one report of this, it seems unlikely that systemd is doing this.  Surely we’d have thousands of reports of this is something systemd always did.

> I have never seen init.d blow itself up over bloody symlinks.

Only the systemd-readahead process failed.  It’s an optional component.  systemd is clearly not “blown up” on Mark’s system, else he couldn’t have gotten to a login prompt.

This optional component diagnosed an actual problem, that’s all.

> The readahead, while /possibly/ nice isn't at all necessary on modern hardware.

Explain then why a VM containing a given OS generally boots faster the second time on a given host than rebooting the same OS on the bare hardware running that VM host.

RAM caches matter more today than they ever did, due to the vast disparity between storage access speeds in a modern system.  Precharging the caches is still a good idea in 2017.

> I want my hardware to boot consistently, not bomb like an Adam Sandler movie because of /symlinks/.

Hyperbolic much?

> I'd be willing to bet a year's salary most admins hate systemd with a passion.

I think you’re basing that bet on data generated by an angry noisy minority.