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by frutiger 1482 days ago
> 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.
3 comments
rektide 1482 days ago
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.

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dspillett 1482 days ago
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.
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yjftsjthsd-h 1482 days ago
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.
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frutiger 1482 days ago
Yes, this just highlights the cognitive dissonance that systemd haters have.
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fsflover 1482 days ago
You mean, if there is one monolithic thing, then it's fine to introduce more?
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yjftsjthsd-h 1482 days ago
systemd is in userspace; what are you trying to say?
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bdhcuidbebe 1481 days ago
Just read the thread rather than trying to conjure meaning from a single comment like a rtard.
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yjftsjthsd-h 1481 days ago
> 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)

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