Bug#769907: general: non-sysvinit init systems are made of fail
Package: general
Severity: important
Dear Debian Maintainers,
I tried the alternative init systems (namely upstart and systemd) and
while I think there is some potential in these systems I don't think
they are ready for Jessie.
As basic system component the init system needs to be very realiable
which cannot be guaranteed for a piece of software that is introduced
and installed by default as core system component in the same release
cycle. There was some possibility to install alternative init system in
wheezy but as the support for switching between the various systems was
not in place it was not very practical and the packaging tools
discouraged such use.
I tried to install an alternative init system on like half a dozen of
systems and I am disappointed. I stumbled upon two serious problems with
these new systems.
1) the problem with new feature in systemd which considers all
filesystems in fstab vital for system boot and stops boot if they fail.
It's been decided that although it is a change in behaviour that might
render some systems unbootable it's technically correct implementation
and only enforces that non-vital filesystems are marked as such in fstab
which should have been the case from the start.
2) other problem is 'mystery meat init' - you see some initial
bootloader or kernel messages and when init starts .. nothing.
When init decides a filesystem needs to be checked or that it has to
stop due to error .. nothing. To be a reasonable sysvinit replacement
systemd and upstart must output messages to consoles(s) to which
sysvinit did output messages, even on systems with multiple consoles
(eg. serial, vga, kms). Note that this is on systems where sysvinit does
give messages on the console so if the system was upgraded to systemd as
part of release upgrade it would lose console as the result or upgrading
to new release.
I am wondering what other subtle bugs are lurking in these new init
systems. I am not completely against switching to a new init system but
imho that should be done only once that init system was avaialble for at
least one release as routinely installable and uninstallable package.
Otherwise the core system component cannot possibly have been tested for
suitability in general and for good integration into Debian in
particular.
Thanks
Michal
-- System Information:
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu GNU/Linux testing (jessie)
Release: testing
Codename: jessie
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 3.11-trunk-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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