[christophilus]

I really like systemd, but from what I understand, the folks who don’t like it have a number of gripes. The one that most resonates with me is that systemd is monolithic as opposed to the old Unix philosophy of small, simple tools that compose.

[nvrspyx]

I'm not super familiar with systemd or any of the lower level stuff like init systems in general, but I was under the impression that it's just an umbrella for many individual modules/binaries, like journald, etc, and not actually monolithic.

I get the argument against hard dependencies, which the individual modules seem to be dependent on each other, but is that really that abnormal with Linux programs? I more understand the criticism against higher level programs, like GNOME, having hard dependency on systemd specifically.

With all that said, I'm not doubting there's valid criticism as I'm sure that I'm missing for fundamental points of the "monolithic" argument as it relates to systemd. The above is just my sort-of layman impression.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> but I was under the impression that it's just an umbrella for many individual modules/binaries, like journald, etc, and not actually monolithic.

If you can't use journald without systemd, and you can't use systemd without journald, or they really modular in any meaningful sense? I can take a Void Linux system and drop in rsyslog and chronyd and maybe dnsmasq (for DNS caching); I can't take a Void system and add journald and timesyncd and resolved.

[BenjiWiebe]

I'd agree that systemd is modular, but I wouldn't list journald as an example of modularity.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

What would you use as an example of modularity? The closest that most of it gets is that you can disable features and put back the non-systemd alternatives, but I'm not aware of any systemd components that play nice on non-systemd systems except for maybe systemd-boot nee gummiboot (which benefits from running before systemd and therefore is less inclined to depend on it).

[frutiger]

> systemd is monolithic as opposed to the old Unix philosophy of small, simple tools that compose

Isn't the typical Unix kernel that most users interact with a giant monolithic program with some runtime modules but mostly compile time configurability? I think this goes all the way back to the original Unix kernels.

[rektide]

Most users don't interact with the kernel. They interact with a posix (or posix-like) environment. And that is definitely a kalidescope of independent utilities. Most of which are at least somewhat portable across *nix/bsds.

To the haters credit, previously the init system itself was also authored with posix-compatible tools. And could be hacked upon easily, readily, without compiling. By compare, you'd kind of need to attach gdb or what not to systemd's pid1 to see what's happening, and it'd be much more complex, and you'd need to be compiling your own systemd to make changes. I'm a huge systemd proponent, but to be honest, it's shocking to me that there's not a bunch of guides to running gdb, to watching systemd do it's thing: we largely are all consumers, accepting systemd's activities/behaviors on faith.

[dspillett]

Yes, and as kernels grew this is where the arguments for/against micro-kernels began. Modular monoliths seem most common ATM, but micro-kernel architectures haven't entirely lost the game yet.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

The kernel being largely monolithic is an annoyance that people do keep trying to fix where possible, but it's easier to sweep that under the rug than to deal with monoliths in userspace.

[frutiger]

Yes, this just highlights the cognitive dissonance that systemd haters have.

[fsflover]

You mean, if there is one monolithic thing, then it's fine to introduce more?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

systemd is in userspace; what are you trying to say?

[bdhcuidbebe]

Just read the thread rather than trying to conjure meaning from a single comment like a rtard.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Just read the thread rather than trying to conjure meaning from a single comment

My comments are half of the thread, and I don't think I'm missing context; yes, the kernel is often a monolith, but 1. nobody really likes that, it's just hard to fix[0], and 2. the kernel can mostly be ignored because it presents a clean enough ABI and doesn't really affect userspace[1], whereas systemd is a monolith in userspace that very much does affect the rest of the system. I'm not seeing any "cognitive dissonance".

> rather than trying to conjure meaning from a single comment like a rtard

Insulting people is both against the site guidelines[2] and an excellent people to get people to disagree with you even if they might have been otherwise convinced.

[0] Because context switching in and out of ring 0 murders performance.

[1] Seriously, you can swap out the kernel completely like Debian kFreeBSD and it's basically invisible to the user.

[2] "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)