[vezzy-fnord]

> As far as I know there is no way to make a transactional state machine without having the concept of a single, reordable work unit.

You're basically taking systemd's architecture as an axiomatic premise, so no surprise your conclusion is obvious. I reject the premise, and the fruits of it I go into detail in chapter 3.

For the record I am mostly a Unix-hater, so your complaints about Unix are things I agree with. systemd, however, is simply more New Jersey design with unwarranted pretensions.

systemd, in a way, is exactly the init system that a community as infantile and disordered as Linux rightfully deserves. May they enjoy it.

I'll leave things at that.

[cycloptic]

No I am not commenting on systemd or Linux at all. The fact is that if you implement a dependency graph, you must track and resolve state. There is no way around this. Add in support for event listeners and one-shot syscalls out to hardware (because remember, udev or some equivalent is still a critical piece in all this and there is no HAL to handle this for us) and now you have to deal with transactions. Try to parallelize it and now you have work units. That's the way it goes. Even in microkernels you will find all these things scattered around and they aren't going to be less painful just because you wrote them in eBPF. I liked the third chapter but it left me a bit disappointed because it didn't mention anything other than a critique of the wrong way to do it.