Bug#727708: Bits from linux.conf.au
On 13/01/14 12:15, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> Алексей Шилин dixit:
>> In his talk [2] at 13:50 Marc briefly touched the init system choice question.
>
> Can you please provide a transcript, for those among us who
> do not watch any video?
In the slides[0] 13 to 15, he summarises init systems something like:
* SysV - simple, familiar and deterministic
* Upstart - fast boot, makes sense on laptops, but inherently racey
* systemd - interesting concept, but too disruptive/complex to buy into
Then he gives a preference for Debian's own insserv and startpar. It
allows for boot order to be fixed (after running insserv once, the same
/etc/rc2.d/Sxx numbering may be rsync'd out to many machines). startpar
allows for some limited/controlled amount of concurrency to happen, for
extra speed.
For servers, their priority is in reliability/reproducibility of boot
(especially for pre-deployment testing), as the machines are so rarely
rebooted, and engineer time to debug any boot problem is so costly.
It's worth mentioning their boot is customised already for their
environment. Before the root filesystem is mounted, there seems to be
some centralised logging, and an sshd started in the initrd, for human
or automated intervention in case the machine doesn't finish booting.
That may have pushed them in favour of a simpler init system.
[0]: http://marc.merlins.org/linux/talks/ProdNG-LCA2014/ProdNG.odp
Regards,
--
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org
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