Re: [gentoo-dev] News item for eudev deprecation

[Anthony G. Basile]

On 8/24/21 6:24 AM, Jaco Kroon wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> We run glibc based systems.  No musl.  But we don't use systemd.
>
> As little as a year back we still ran into issues with systemd-udev
> variant breaking systems, the fix of course was to nuke it and install
> eudev.  Are we certain there is nothing (eg, LVM integration was our
> biggest problem resulting in really crazy impossible to debug since we
> can't log in due to lvn snapshot creation/removal deadlocking with
> systemd-udev - no ask me not how, all I can tell you is that eudev never
> exhibited this behaviour) will break?
>
> Whilst I fully appreciate the difficult of all the various e* packages
> (elogind, eudev etc ..) and I most certainly do not have the capacity to
> maintain, and therefore I'm in full support of the concept of
> deprecating eudev, I'm very, very worried about us suddenly being back
> into the reboot-a-server-a-week scenario.  In the worst case we've lost
> some large filesystems almost certainly due to systemd-udev (we've had a
> number of filesystem crashes which was recovered with fsck, but after
> ditching systemd-udev and moving to eudev about two years back on this
> specific host we've had ZERO further problems other than a failed drive
> or two, none of which required a hard-reset to get back to a sane state).
>
> Kind Regards,
> Jaco

I kept eudev as conservative as possible which probably explains its
predictable behavior.  Open bugs with the sys-fs/udev maintainers and
mark it critical if it is damaging filesystems.


>
> On 2021/08/22 22:14, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> Yes!  It is time to finally deprecate eudev!  sys-fs/udev now builds
>> under musl!  My original purpose for maintaining eudev was because
>> systemd + musl did not play well together when udev was absorbed into
>> the sytemd repo.  Now thanks to patches from openembedded, they do, and
>> my original reason for maintaining eudev is no longer valid.  So its
>> time to retire eudev.  It has served its purpose as a stop-gap.
>>
>> To me, this is a success for musl, and I would like to thank all the
>> developers who have taken musl seriously enough to make this happen :)
>>
>> I am willing to transfer the eudev repo to another organization, but I
>> will not maintain it anymore and Base System doesn't want to either.
>> Let me warn people, to maintain it correctly you MUST become familiar
>> with its internals and watch what systemd is doing upstream to keep up.
>>  This is not trivial.  I learned a lot from eudev, and it did save musl
>> on gentoo, but there was a period there when it was taking up almost all
>> of my time.  If you don't know what you're getting into, you don't want
>> to take on its maintenance.
>>
>>
>>
>> Title: eudev retirement on 2022-01-01
>> Author: Anthony G. Basile <blueness@g.o>
>> Posted: 2021-08-xx
>> Revision: 1
>> News-Item-Format: 2.0
>> Display-If-Installed: sys-fs/eudev
>>
>> sys-fs/udev is becoming the standard provider of udev on non-systemd
>> (e.g. OpenRC) systems. Users of systemd will continue to use the udev
>> services provided by the sys-apps/systemd package itself.
>>
>> The transition should be uneventful in most cases, but please read this
>> item in full to understand some possible corner cases.
>>
>> eudev will be retired and removed from Gentoo on 2022-01-01. We will
>> start masking eudev on 2021-10-01 and give people 3 months to prepare
>> their transition. You should ensure that sys-fs/eudev is not in your
>> world file by running
>>
>>   emerge --deselect sys-fs/eudev
>>
>> in order for Portage to replace eudev with sys-fs/udev once the
>> package.mask is in place. We fully support udev on musl, whereas uclibc
>> will still have to rely on eudev before also being removed on 2022-01-01.
>>
>>   **WARNING**
>>
>> If you happen to have an INSTALL_MASK with a blanket "*systemd*" glob,
>> you will inevitably break your system. sys-fs/udev contains "systemd" in
>> some of its filenames, hence a blanket filter rule will likely lead to a
>> non-functional udev installation.
>>
>>   Rationale
>>
>> The integration of udev into the systemd git repo introduced numerous
>> problems for none-glibc systems, such as musl and uclibc. Several
>> options were considered, and the one chosen was to fork and maintain
>> udev independant of the rest of systemd. This was meant as a stop-gap
>> solution until such time as the problems with systemd on musl had been
>> resolved. This is now the case with patches provided by openembedded,
>> and my original reason for maintaining eudev is no longer relevant.
>>
>> I am willing to transfer eudev to another umbrella organisation or Linux
>> distribution that is willing to continue its maintenance, but
>> maintaining eudev cannot be done purely through proxy-maintaining and
>> requires an understanding of its internals. This is a steep learning
>> curve and must be an earnest effort. For this reason, the Base System
>> project has decided not to support euev as an option going forward.
>>
>


-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@g.o
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