[srslack]

You'll find that there's pretty much nothing you can't outright disable, except for journald. journald needs to be running, but you can turn off the binary logging and redirect everything to syslog. systemd itself is a collection of system daemons, as well as small programs to interact with those daemons, and almost all of them are disabled by default. That's my experience on Arch, and they adhere strictly to upstream defaults. If that weren't enough you could simply leave out the daemons you don't like at compile time.

[JdeBP]

> you can turn off the binary logging

Every time that people write that they tell other people who do know systemd that they do not know it. The journal cannot be turned off. Making it be stored in files in /run/log/journal/ instead of in files in /var/log/journal/ is not turning it off. It's making it non-persistent so that it doesn't last across system restarts, delegating the job of writing persistent logs to post-processing services that (nowadays) read the journal using its systemd-specific database access facilities. Ironically, making it not be stored in any files at all would actually prohibit the post-processing services from working, as they would have nothing to read and to process into their own formats.

* http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/332315/5132

[srslack]

>they tell other people who do know systemd that they do not know it.

I appreciate the concern, thanks.

>The journal cannot be turned off.

The persistent binary logging is turned off, which is what people bitch about. Obviously, many of systemd's monitoring features are tied to the journal, and as stated journald still needs to be running, obviously writing to a non-persistent journal for these and forwarding logs (if specified.)

>delegating the job of writing persistent logs to post-processing services that (nowadays) read the journal using its systemd-specific database access facilities.

It's true that syslog-ng pulls messages from the journal, whereas syslog implementations that are not aware are provided with them over a compatibility socket, but this is a performance optimization, to reduce system overhead. Not really an important distinction.

The context was turning persistent logs off and switching to on-disk and persistent text logs with syslog. If you really wanted to nitpick: dbus and udev are totally non-optional.

[majewsky]

Is udev optional on any Linux system? (Okay, you probably don't need it on embedded, but then you likely won't want to afford systemd anyway.)

[JdeBP]

Yes. For starters, vdev and mdev exist.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11302557

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609980

[lksgkjhsgkjh]

vdev was already given up again:

> This system is mothballed.

From its Github page at https://github.com/jcnelson/vdev