And not in a good way. It is essentially the traffic cop that starts up and shuts down various Linux and Unix applications. Unfortunately, it is huge, bloated, and buggy. The original solution was a daemon called init (daemon?) that was the first process to start in the boot cycle and it kept running until you shut the system down. You needed to know what the fsck you were doing but it was very light and nimble and it worked (works) well. It is small enough and has been around for long enough that everyone is familiar with it.
Saw this today on Slashdot:
Systemd Now Has More Than 1.2 Million Lines of Code
This week Phoronix marked a very special anniversary:
Five years ago today was the story on Phoronix how the systemd source tree was approaching 550k lines so curiosity got the best of me to see how large is the systemd Git repository today. Well, now it's over 1.2 million lines.
After surpassing one million lines in 2017, when running GitStats on the systemd Git repository today it's coming in at 1,207,302 lines. Those 1.2 million lines are spread across 3,260 files and made over 40,057 commits from nearly 1,400 different authors... So far this year there have been 2,145 commits while last year saw 6,245 commits while 2016 and 2017 each saw less than four thousand commits total. Lennart Poettering continues being the most prolific contributor to systemd with more than 32% of the commits so far this year.
SystemD is reviled enough that there is a website about it: Take a stand against systemd! listing all of the distributions that do not use SystemD. E.M. Smith had a nice post from last October:
More SystemD Follies
Here’s an interesting article by an experienced Systems Admin saying he is done with SystemD. I find the “honesty” in it refreshing ;-)
http://www.cathalferris.com/archives/1154
Systemd stupidity – or why Poettering is an idiot
Yes I work as a Unix admin, and I’m getting so sick of “systemd”, that complete ball of crap that Poettering has foisted upon the Linux community. His poor quality of work has singlehandedly caused the most problems I’ve had to face in my day-to-day work in the past year, through his shoddy code, his abysmal system design and his complete lack of knowledge on how to do things the Linux way.
Things that systemd breaks, in no particular order, and I’ll update this as I see them:
Much much more at the site. Anything with 1,400 individual authors and more than a million lines of code is going to be buggy as shit. I use Debian and Puppy.
Leave a comment