85 lines
5.3 KiB
Text
85 lines
5.3 KiB
Text
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[file]
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slides.pdf
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[notes]
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### 1
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### 2
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Let's start off by looking at what an init system is, how they used to work and what systemd does different before we go into more systemd-specific details.
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### 3
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system processes that are started include for example FS mounts, network settings, powertop...
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system services are long-running processes such as daemons, e.g. SSH, database or web servers, session managers, udev ...
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orphans: Process whose parent has finished somehow, gets adopted by init system
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-> when a process terminates its parent must call wait() to get its exit() code, if there is no init system adopting orphans the process would become a zombie
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### 4
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Before systemd there were simple init systems that just did the tasks listed on the previous slide.
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Init scripts -> increased greatly in complexity over time, look at incomprehensible skeleton for Debian service init scripts
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Runlevels -> things such as single-user mode, full multiuser mode, reboot, halt
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Init will run all the scripts, but it will not do much more than print information on success/failure of started scripts
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Init scripts run strictly sequential
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Init is unaware of inter-service dependencies, expressed through prefixing scripts with numbers etc.
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Init will not watch processes after system is booted -> crashing daemons will not automatically restart
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### 5
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### 6
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How systemd came to be
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Considering the lack of process monitoring, problematic things about init scripts -> legacy init systems have drawbacks
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Apple had already built launchd, a more featured init system that monitored running processes, could automatically restart them and allowed for certain advanced features -> however it is awful to use and wrap your head around
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Lennart Poettering of Pulseaudio fame and Kay Sievers decided to implement a new init system to address these problems, while taking certain clues from Apple's design
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### 7
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Systemd's design goals
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### 8
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No more init scripts with opaque effects -> services are clearly defined units
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Unit dependencies -> systemd can figure out what can be started in parallel
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Process supervision: Unit can be configured in many ways, e.g. always restart, only restart on success etc
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Service logs: We'll talk more about this later
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### 9
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Units are the core component of systemd that users deal with. They define services and everything else that systemd needs to start and manage.
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Note that all these are the names of the respective man page on a system with systemd installed
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Types:
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systemd.service - processes controlled by systemd
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systemd.target - equivalent to "runlevels", grouping of units for synchronisation
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systemd.timer - more powerful replacement of cron that starts other units
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systemd.path - systemd equvialent of inotify, watches files/folders -> launches units
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systemd.socket - expose local IPC or network sockets, launch units on connections
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systemd.device - trigger units when certain devices are connected
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systemd.mount - systemd equivalent of fstab entries
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systemd.swap - like mount
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systemd.slice - unit groups for resource management purposes
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... and a few more specialised ones
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### 10
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Linux cgroups are a new resource management feature added quite a long time ago, but not used much.
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Cgroups can be created manually and processes can be moved into them in order to control resource utilisation
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Few people used them before systemd, limits.conf was often much easier but not as fine-grained
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Systemd changed this
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### 11
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Systemd collects standard output and stderr from all processes into its journal system
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they provide a tool for querying the log, for example grouping service logs together with correct timestamps, querying,
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### 12
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Systemd tooling, most important one is systemctl for general service management
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journalctl is the query and management tool for journald
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systemd-analyze is used for figuring out performance issues, for example by analysing the boot process, can make cool graphs of dependencies
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systemd-cgtop is like top, but not on a process level - it's on a cgroup/slice level, shows combined usage of cgroups
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systemd-cgls lists contents of systemd's cgroups to see which services are in what group
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there also exist a bunch of others that we'll skip for now
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### 13
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### 14
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### 15
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Systemd criticism comes from many directions and usually focuses on a few points
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feature-creep: systemd is absorbing a lot of different services
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### 16
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explain diagram a bit
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### 17
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opaque: as a result, systemd has a lot more internal complexity that people can't easily wrap your mind around. However I argue that unless you're using something like suckless' sinit with your own scripts, you probably have no idea what your init does today anyways
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unstable: this was definitely true even in the first stable release, with the binary log format getting corrupted for example. I haven't personally experienced any trouble with it recently though.
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Another thing is that services start depending on systemd when they shouldn't, a problem for the BSD world (who cares (hey christoph!))
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### 18
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Despite criticism, systemd was adopted rapidly by large portions of the Linux
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Initially in RedHat, because Poettering and co work there and it was clear from the beginning that it would be there
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ArchLinux (which I'm using) and a few others followed suit quite quickly
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Eventually, the big Debian init system discussion - after a lot of flaming - led to Debian adopting it as well, which had a ripple effect for related distros such as Ubuntu which abandoned upstart for it.
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