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Michael Stapelberg
people.debian.org/~stapelberg · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Michael Stapelberg, a Debian developer, writes about systemd, Debian tooling, Debian Code Search, and performance work.
What HN saysCommenters link it in systemd debates, where one calls his bloat argument FUD. It is also cited for the survey results and Debian manpage changes.
15HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
8stories submitted
225story points
3 years agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Systemd’s dependencies and installation footprint4 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 2Systemd is not portable and what this means for our ports2 people · 117 points · first shared 2013 · 102 comments on HN
- 3Results of the Debian systemd survey2 people · 88 points · first shared 2013 · 102 comments on HN
- 4Debian manual pages has been modernized2 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 5Systemd bloat2 people · first shared 2014
- 6Debian Code Search: how we reduced query runtime from 20m to 2m for slow queries1 people · 7 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 7Announcing the New Debian Code Search Instant1 people · 3 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 8Debmirror 6x speed-up, or how to fill a 1 GBps Rackspace link1 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9Dh-make-golang: Turning Go packages into Debian packages1 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 10Systemd bloat1 people · first shared 2013
- 11Debian codesearch latency1 people · first shared 2016
- 12Systemd transition1 people · first shared 2013
What HN people wrote when they linked it
chris_wot · 2015-05-09
This honestly seems like FUD. Currently the Sys-V like serialisation of services at startup hasn't been efficient, and sysvinit doesn't handle event based kernel features at all well. And it's definitely not modular.
As for this argument that it's monolithic in its code organisation - lolwut? You don't need to have a seperate repository for each binary, hardly anyone does that. When you talk about clearly and vigorously defined interfaces, it seems to already have them - and I hardly consider sysvinit to be a great example of such a thing - a bunch of cobbled together shell scripts serialised into a particular order isn't particularly clean or elegant. Heck, it's not even necessarily easy to troubleshoot if things go wrong. The systemd source is in one git repo, sure, but I can't see why maintenance will be a burden. What in particular concerns you?
You do realize that there are only a few binaries? Let's look at them:
networkd: handles network events - when a network device is created it handles setup. No, it does not supplant udev. Read here an overview: https://coreos.com/blog/intro-to-systemd-networkd/
Not a bad idea here: and very sensible aspect of systemd.
journald - collects log data from a variety of sources and puts it into a binary indexed data file. The most controversial aspect of systemd, but of course as is overlooked all the log data can be forwarded to syslog, kmsg, the console or wall via a simple configuration change.
Or, you can swap out the…
fsflover · 2023-08-18
Related writeup: https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/2013/06/09/systemd-bloat.html.
bayindirh · 2018-11-27
They have listened to the people. Systemd has selected as a result of a poll [0].
[0] https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/2013/05/27/systemd-survey-result…
brudgers · 2017-01-20
For context, Debian recently restructured the manpages:
https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg//2017/01/18/manpages-debian-org.…
secure · 2016-08-28
It is! https://github.com/Debian/dcs/commit/e1c04a3c0cfbfc11a0e8eaac505775ed1…
Check out https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg//2016/08/08/debian-codesearch-la… for details on the most recent bigger change.
jryan49 · 2015-07-01
This seems to suggest you don't even need dbus daemon running to have things working: https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/docs/systemd-dependencies.html just using the library doesn't seem bad to me...
nona · 2014-02-10
Not everything of systemd is in PID 1. And yes, what some people consider necessary and important or even essential features missing from sysvinit, others consider bloat.
Just to ensure we're all talking about the same thing, here's an overview of systemd's footprint:
http://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/docs/systemd-dependencies.html
From the article:
"On most machines, systemd will bring from 236 KiB to 550 KiB of additional libraries to be loaded into memory. When recompiling systemd without its optional dependencies (e.g. for embedded systems), this shrinks to 368 KiB in the worst case.
The RSS (Resident Set Size) of systemd is 1.8 MiB, whereas sysvinit uses 0.8 MiB — both measured on typical Debian wheezy installations."
bkor · 2014-01-21
I suggest investigating systemd then. It isn't bloated. See for instance http://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/2013/06/09/systemd-bloat.html. There are a lot of different parts to it.
Note the time of the blog. Saying systemd is bloated is IMO so 2013 :P
jmillikin · 2013-07-14
> This blog post is the third of a series of posts
> dealing with the results of the Debian systemd survey
Previous posts in the series
http://people.debian.org/~stapelberg//2013/06/09/systemd-bloat.html
http://people.debian.org/~stapelberg//2013/07/01/systemd-transition.ht…
wyc · 2014-02-09
Just my two cents as I haven't seen it mentioned in this thread:
launchd is the init system used by Mac OSX and has been ported to FreeBSD a few years ago with a recent resurgent effort for improvements [1]. It has been suggested that launchd could one day be the new FreeBSD init system due to speed and feature improvements, but many FreeBSD users think that the init system is a non-issue and efforts could be better spent elsewhere. launchd has also been criticized as to have been developed for OSX and not BSD (e.g. it depends on CoreFoundation features).
There is growing concern that applications will become more reliant on systemd and therefore Linux-only features [2], reducing or eliminating portability to the BSDs. Unfortunately, most conversations about init systems and FreeBSD degenerate into flame wars [3].
[1]: https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd
[2]: http://people.debian.org/~stapelberg//2013/07/13/systemd-not-portable.…
[3]: http://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?t=35770