[gentoo-amd64] Re: Please get me straight about sysvinit vs. systemd, udev vs eudev vs mdev, virtuals and other things...

[Duncan]

Tanstaafl posted on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 12:15:50 -0500 as excerpted:

> Why did udev *merge* with systemd, if there is no long term goal of
> completely and totally subsuming it such that you cannot use udev
> without also using systemd?
>
> Imnsho, since it is a KERNEL thingie, it should have been maintained as
> a totally separate package, or just admit the long term goal and be done
> with it.

Actually, the point of udev was /userland/ (not kernel) managed device 
policy.  The idea was to keep the policy out of the kernel, unlike the 
now dead 2.4-kernel devfs.  (Current kernels do contain a slight variant 
of tmpfs called devtmpfs specific to devices, but that doesn't do policy; 
it's designed to be managed by userspace, tho in the absence of a 
userspace device manager, kernelspace will create default-named device-
nodes there.)

Meanwhile, for the record, the systemd and now udev folks have stated 
that they would like to eventually merge udev fully into systemd, and 
indeed, it's already shipped as a single tarball, but that udev is likely 
to remain a separate binary that can be run stand-alone for some time, 
because that's necessary in ordered to be able to keep a somewhat small 
initramfs, with udev but without all the trappings of a full-fledged 
systemd.

However, with the introduction of kdbus and other changes, I'm wondering 
if they'll decide they might as well shoehorn systemd onto the initramfs 
as well, and will then subsume the full udev binary as well...


(This said as an openrc user at least for the time being... even 
apparently one of the only people actually running the live-git 
openrc-9999, or at least all the bugs filed on it seem to be mine.  I've 
suspected for some time that I'll eventually switch to systemd, but was 
at least originally hoping to avoid it until it quits actively blackholing 
nearly everything it comes across and had some reasonable time to 
stabilize without gobbling something else up.  But when that'll be... who 
knows?  And I'm getting an itch to try it one of these days, or at least 
seriously read up on it with a view to _consider_ trying it, tho if I do 
it'll likely still be against my better judgment, since I don't see it 
really stabilizing any time soon and I had originally planned to wait for 
that.  So I guess I sort of fall in the middle in this debate.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman