systemd Status Update (original) (raw)

It has been a while since my last status update on systemd. Here's another short, incomprehensive status update on what we worked on for systemd since then.

• Fedora F15 (Rawhide) now includes a split up/etc/init.d/rc.sysinit (Bill Nottingham). This allows us to keep only a minimal compatibility set of shell scripts around, and boot otherwise a system without any shell scripts at all. In fact, shell scripts during early boot are only used in exceptional cases, i.e. when you enabled autoswapping (bad idea anyway), when a full SELinux relabel is necessary, during the first boot after initialization, if you have static kernel modules to load (which are not configured via the systemd-native way to do that), if you boot from a read-only NFS server, or when you rely on LVM/RAID/Multipath. If nothing of this applies to you can easily disable these parts of early boot and save several seconds on boot. How to do this I will describe in a later blog story.
• We have a fully C coded shutdown logic that kills all remaining processes, unmounts all remaining file systems, detaches all loop devices and DM volumes and does that in the right way to ensure that all these things are properly teared down even if they depend on each other in arbitrary ways. This is not only considerably faster then the traditional shell hackery for this, but also a lot safer, since we try to unmount/remount the remaining file systems with a little bit of brains. This feature is available via systemctl --force poweroff to the administrator. The --force controls whether the usual shutdown of all services is run or whether this is skipped and we immediately shall enter this final C shutdown logic. Using --forcehence is a much safer replacement for the old /sbin/reboot -f and does not leave dirty file systems behind. (Thanks to Fabiano Fidencio has his colleagues from ProFUSION for this).
• systemd now includes a minmalistic readahead implementation, based on fanotify(), fadvise() and mincore(). It supports btrfs defragmentation and both SSD and HDD disks. While the effect on boots that are anyway fast (such as most stuff involving SSD) is minimal, slower and older machines benefit from this more substantially.
• We now control fsck and quota during early boot with a C tool that ensure maximum parallelization but properly implements the necessary high-level administration logic.
• Every service, every user and every user session now gets its own cgroup in the 'cpu' hierarchy thus creating better fairness between the logged in users and their sessions.
• We now provide /dev/log logging from early boot to late shutdown. If no syslog daemon is running the output is passed on to kmsg. As soon as a proper syslog daemon starts up the kmsg buffer is flushed to syslog, and hence we will have complete log coverage in syslog even for early boot.
• systemctl kill was introduced, an easy command to send a signal to all processes of a service. Expect a blog story with more details about this shortly.
• systemd gained the ability to load the SELinux policy if necessary, thus supporting non-initrd boots and initrd boots from the same binary with no duplicate work. This is in fact (and surprisingly) a first among Linux init systems.
• We now initialize and set the system locale inside PID 1 to be inherited by all services and users.
• systemd has native support for /etc/crypttab and can activate encrypted LUKS/dm-crypt disks both at boot-up and during runtime. A minimal password querying infrastructure is available, where multiple agents can be used to present the password to the user. During boot the password is queried either via Plymouth or directly on the console. If a system crypto disk is plugged in after boot you are queried for the password via a GNOME agent, or a wall(1) agent. Finally, while you run systemctl start (or a similar command) a minimal TTY password agent is available which asks you for passwords right-away if this is necessary. The password querying logic is very simple, additional agents can be implemented in a trivial amount of code (Yupp, KDE folks, you can add an agent for this, too). Note that the password querying logic in systemd is only for non-user passwords, i.e. passwords that have no relation to a specific user, but rather to specific hardware or system software. In future we hope to extend this so that this can be used to query the password of SSL certificates when Apache or other servers start.
• We offer a minimal interface that external projects can use to extend the dependency graph systemd manages. In fact, the cryptsetup logic mentioned above is implemented via this 'plugin'-like system. Since we did not want to add code that deals with cryptographic disks into the systemd process itself we introduced this interface (after all cryptographic volumes are not an essential feature of a minimal OS, and unncessary on most embedded uses; also the future might bring us STC which might make this at least partially obsolete). Simply by dropping a generator binary into/lib/systemd/system-generators which should write out systemd unit files into a temporary directory third-party packages may extend the systemd dependency tree dynamically. This could be useful for example to automatically create a systemd service for each KVM machine or LXC container. With that in place those containers/machines could be managed and supervised with the same tools as the usual system services.
• We integrated automatic clean-up of directories such as /tmp into the tmpfiles logic we already had in place that recreates files and directories on volatile file systems such as /var/run,/var/lock or /tmp.
• We now always measure and write to the log files the system startup time we measured, broken up into how many time was spent on the kernel, the initrd and the initialization of userspace.
• We now safely destroy all user session before going down. This is a feature long missing on Linux: since user processes were not killed until the very last moment the unhealthy situation that user code was running at a time where no other daemon was remaining was a normal part of shutdown.
• systemd now understands an 'extreme' form of disabling a service: if you symlink a service name in /etc/systemd/system to /dev/nullthen systemd will mark it as masked and completely refuse starting it, regardless if this is requested manually or automaticallly. Normally it should be sufficient to simply call systemctl disable to disable a service which still allows manual activation but no automatic activation. Masking a service goes one step further.
• There's now a simple condition syntax in places which allows skipping or enabling units depending on the existance of a file, whether a directory is empty or whether a kernel command line option is set.
• In addition to normal shutdowns for reboot, halt or poweroff we now similarly support a kexec reboot, that reboots the machine without going though the BIOS code again.
• We have bash completion support for systemctl. (Ran Benita)
• Andrew Edmunds contributed basic support to boot Ubuntu with systemd.
• Michael Biebl and Tollef Fog Heen have worked on the systemd integration into Debian to a level that it is now possible to boot a system without having the old initscripts packaged installed. For more details see the Debian Wiki. Michael even tested this integration on an Ubuntu Natty system and as it turns out this works almost equally well on Ubuntu already. If you are interesting in playing around with this, ping Michael.

And that's it for now. There's a lot of other stuff in the git commits, but most of it is smaller and I will it thus spare you.

We have come quite far in the last year. systemd is about a year old now, and we are now able to boot a system without legacy shell scripts remaining, something that appeared to be a task for the distant future.

All of this is available in systemd 13 and in F15/Rawhide as I type this. If you want to play around with this then consider installing Rawhide (it's fun!).