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by steevdave 2876 days ago
The lack of contributors has a lot to do with Lennart's (apologies if I misspelled his name) attitude early on in systemd's development.

I have no idea if it has changed, as I gave up trying to get things fixed.

The one issue I still have with systemd is the way it handles the kernel's command line.

I work with Chromebooks a lot, using software that isn't ChromeOS. The cool thing is that they can use FIT images so you can load multile kernels and device tree bindings into one image. So I can use the same sdcard on the Acer tegra Chromebook, Samsung's Chromebook, as well as the ASUS Flip Chromebook. However, to boot from sdcard you have to enable developer mode. When you enable developer mode, it adds a flag to the kernel command line "debug" - systemd sees that and thinks you want systemd in debug mode (wat?) Unfortunately there is no way to override this. I've tried passing the log level as info, which sort of works, until journalctl starts, and IT parses the debug flag in the command line and ignores the flag that sets the log level to info.

No amount of explaining this helped and I (and many others who have had various issues) gave up on trying to help make systemd better.

The only workaround to this is to stop using 1 sdcard amongst all of my Chromebooks and use individual sdcards per machine that uses a u-boot built for each Chromebook that does not pass the debug flag.

I like systemd and many of it's features are helpful, but when you run into issues, it's almost always an uphill battle to fix them, even when you provide a patch.

3 comments

> adds a flag to the kernel command line "debug" - systemd sees that and thinks you want systemd in debug mode

A reasonable assumption, given that systemd is taking care of the whole OS, and if you want the kernel in debug mode, you’d reasonably want the system in debug mode too. But it’s not obviously correct, either, and ultimately it boils down to “who owns the kernel command line flags”. There was some kerfuffle about exactly that between the kernel and systemd people, but they eventually worked it out – I think systemd no longer tries to assert ownership of the "debug" kernel command line parameter.

Ah yes, debug parsing. Didn't that attract Torvalds' ire some time ago when it was found that it made systemd flood the kernels log buffer with "junk" data?

Then again the other guy in the systemd team, Sievers, have a long history of pissing the kernel people off with out of the blue unilateral decisions.

I just worry when their buddy GKH is given the reins of the kernel when Torvalds steps down...

Lack of contributors? systemd had over 300 different contributors the last 12 months. That makes it in the top 2% of open source projects (tracked by OpenHub). Which is very impressive for being such a low level component. https://www.openhub.net/p/systemd
Core contributors. Not overall contributors. I should have specified but figured people could read the context based on the comment I was replying to.
Anyone who follows the systemd-devel mailing list and the systemd github repo knows that there's just around four maintainers regularly active to varying degrees, including Lennart.