Re: [gentoo-user] alternative kernels

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 1:11 AM, J. Roeleveld <joost@××××××××.org> wrote:
> On Friday, October 31, 2014 12:37:35 AM Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 12:30 AM, J. Roeleveld <joost@××××××××.org> wrote:
>> > On Thursday, October 30, 2014 06:31:25 AM Rich Freeman wrote:
>> >> On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 3:56 AM, J. Roeleveld <joost@××××××××.org> wrote:
>> >> > On Sunday, October 26, 2014 02:16:24 PM Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>> >> >> And with systemd, rebooting to a new kernel takes just a few seconds
>> >> >> ;)
>> >> >
>> >> > And here I was thinking that the pro-systemd crowd doesn't care about
>> >> > the
>> >> > boot-time of systemd?
>> >> > (See the " [OT} Linus Torvalds on systemd" thread around 18 - 21
>> >> > september)
>> >> >
>> >> > Please make up your mind on this.
>> >>
>> >> This might come as a bit of a shock, but people use Gentoo for
>> >> different reasons, run different init systems, different udev
>> >> implementations, and so on.  Well, believe it or not, systemd users
>> >> are exactly the same way and use different components of systemd for
>> >> different reasons.  People also drive different types of cars, for
>> >> different reasons.
>> >
>> > I agree on this. But in the thread I mentioned, Mark David Dumlao was
>> > quite
>> > aggressive in his wording when the subject was brought up and he claimed
>> > systemd proponents don't care. Canek is the biggest proponent for systemd
>> > on this list.
>>
>> You should have answered then to Mark, not to me, given that I did not
>> said anything in that sub-thread.
>
> My apologies.

No problem.

>> But if it makes you happy, I will try to take notes in the next Big
>> SystemD Evil Conspiracy Meeting so in the future I do not contradict
>> any statement from anyone in the Pure Evil Directorate.
>
> I knew it! There really is one! :)

Of course there is. We have a secret handshake and everything.

> Thing is, I don't see any benefit, for myself, in systemd.
> If people want to use it, fine.
> But, if people are trying to force it upon everyone, then I will have a
> problem with it.

No one is forcing it on anyone, but several developers from different
projects are happily using its (in their view) cool features. If
enough able and willing *developers* don't want to rely on systemd,
they need to provide the same functionality by other means, or ship
versions of the software with less features. But most developers (it
seems) are of the idea "cool, someone else did the work for us".

> Systemd is, in my opinion, suffering from the same feature-creep as Grub2 does.
> Grub1 was faster, because it was smaller. But it isn't working propery anymore
> and Grub2 does its job. I just don't see the point in all the multimedia stuff
> that was put into a bootloader.

I don't mind "feature creep", as long as the *features* are useful and
technically sound. Configuration that is an script generated by
another script? I don't think that's really technically sound. In all
my UEFI machines I'm using Gummiboot[1]; it's really small, really
simple, and works great.

> I just had a look at the use-flags for systemd, similarly to myself wondering
> about multimedia support in grub2, I wonder why there is an HTTP-server
> embedded in journald.

Well, first of all, as you noticed, it has an USE flag, so you can
disable it if you do not want it.

Second of all, it's an (optional) feature that allows you to
synchronize data across a local network; no one in his right mind
would open it up to the whole Internet. From the commit that
introduced the (again, optional) feature [2]:

"""
    journal: add minimal journal gateway daemon based on GNU libmicrohttpd

    This minimal HTTP server can serve journal data via HTTP. Its primary
    purpose is synchronization of journal data across the network. It serves
    journal data in three formats:

           text/plain: the text format known from /var/log/messages
           application/json: the journal entries formatted as JSON
           application/vnd.fdo.journal: the binary export format of the journal

    The HTTP server also serves a small HTML5 app that makes use of the JSON
    serialization to present the journal data to the user.

    Examples:

    This downloads the journal in text format:

     # systemctl start systemd-journal-gatewayd.service
     # wget http://localhost:19531/entries

    Same for JSON:

     # curl -H"Accept: application/json" http://localhost:19531/entries

    Access via web browser:

     $ firefox http://localhost:19531/
"""

> I somehow doubt it has any real security on it and I
> have seen programs write usernames and passwords to stdout/syslog when running
> with the default log-levels.

Again, if you open it to the whole internet, you are either crazy, or
you don't know what you are doing. That's why it's an optional
feature, turned off by default in Gentoo (and every other distro), and
even if you turn it on, you need to start the service manually (as the
example in the commit message says) so you can use the feature.

Since systemd is highly modular, systemd-journal-gatewayd is a
completely different binary, and libmicrohttp never touches at all PID
1. You can think of it as an extra utility that is shipped alongside
systemd, and that you don't even need to build if you don't want to.

Regards.

[1] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/gummiboot/
[2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=7b17a7d72f5ba5ad838b19803534c56a46f3bce9
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Profesor de asignatura, Facultad de Ciencias
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México