Focusing on parallel booting - systemd (Do you hear me now Canonical?)

If Canonical really wants to improve Ubuntu, then having a focus on parallel booting would be the ideal project (Upstart would be shortlived). And, courtesy of Lennart Pottering (a Red Hat employee) at his website, there exists a perfect candidate - systemd.

Unity - Smoonity - who needs Unity to make a better Ubuntu? Since Fedora recently decided to bogart using systemd in Fedora 14 (much to the chagrin of Lennart - visit his blog and read his point-of-view) - what better competition can there be between Linux distributions that to get there first!

Rethinking PID 1 (Fri, 30 Apr 2010).

Scott James Remnant Blog Archive On systemd (April 30, 2010) (Note: Remnant is the architect of Upstart for Ubuntu).

systemd for Administrators, Part 1 (Mon, 23 Aug 2010).

systemd for Administrators, Part II (Wed, 08 Sep 2010).

systemd for Administrators, Part III (Fri, 01 Oct 2010)

systemd Now Has a Web Site (Notice w/repo & mailing list links) (Fri, 07 May 2010).
systemd website/wiki

systemd Status Update (Mon, 23 Aug 2010).

systemd In The News (Wed, 05 May 2010).

-- Tom

P.S. Lennart Pottering (as you will find out if you do not already know) is the person whom introduced us all to Pulse Audio.

 

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that. Upstart can do parallel booting too. Is systemd so much better that Canonical should just give up on their project. Can you explain this a bit?

I'm not sure if that's useful as credentials. PA is still known in among most Linux _users_ as the project that failed. "Sound" by design and badly needed? Yes, sure but the way it was rolled out caused more distress than anyone could account for. The complete Linux audio infrastructure was in a very poor state for at least a year. Note I'm not saying that was Pottering's fault or anything.
In the end of course it was worth it but there's some bitter taste left.
Anyway that's pretty OT and to say something positive too: They'll probably learned from it.
sytemd is also a much less abitious project and basically a drop in replacement. Even if there are some teething troubles it won't be of the scale as with PA.

 

Hi katio,

What I mean by that is that Shuttleworth - in case you have not been keeping up with the raison d'être for the Unity decision by Canonical for Ubuntu 11.04 - is "competion" for the UI. The remark I made stands on its own. If Shuttleworth wants a real competition - do systemd before Red Hat (they already bogarted their opportunity with RH 14).

Just because Upstart may be capable of doing parallel booting - does not mean it is a contender when compared to systemd.

Lennart's credentials as the author of Pulse Audio (he paints himself as an "Audio Terrorist") were not intended to pursuade anyone as a credential for parallel booting - despite the teething problems of PA.

I suggest you read all you can about systemd before letting any preference you may have about Upstart get the best of you. It is not intended as a drop in replacement, but a compete redesign. Having a working model of systemd goes a long way for it to be adopted as the default method.

Clearly, systemd is one of the most exciting developments that has the potential to revolutionize parallel booting - despite the advances made by a number of Linux vendors in improving their own distribution's booting time.

-- Tom

 

Personally I don't have any preferences or care a lot about if and when systemd is rolled out. My primary use of Linux is servers and there boot time simply doesn't matter.

All I can say is I don't share your excitement about parallel booting. Boot time is a single issue and progress has already been made using different strategies, good example is Moblin (don't think it used systemd?)

Lot of OSs these day already boot faster than my BIOS. As long as this isn't taken care of instant-on computers will remain vaporware.

 

Boot time is already good enough for me, exactly how many times a day does one boot, Ubuntu is the quickest followed by Arch and Fedora here.

 

Hi katio,

Yeah, I can see your point-of-view. My excitement comes from having done multiprocessing in the past - the most fun I've ever had in computing!

-- Tom