[systemd-devel] An update

[Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Greg KH <greg at kroah.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 07, 2010 at 02:15:02PM -0200, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 9:34 PM, Canek Pel??ez Vald??s <caneko at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi; I just wanted to give an update on the status of my system running
>> > Gentoo with systemd. I run a full GNOME desktop, with NetworkManager
>> > for connectivity, in a laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at
>> > 2.26 Ghz, 4Gb of memory
>> >
>> > I'm using the systemd ebuild from Gustavo, with some small
>> > modfications, and the ebuilds from Gentoo changed as little as
>> > possible, and using stable versions when possible. With that, I ran
>> > into three problems.
>>
>> which ebuilds do you need more? AFAIR you just need my systemd.ebuild
>> and it should work with upstream portage.
>>
>> BTW, Greg KH which happens to be a Gentoo maintainer offered himself
>> to help merging systemd ebuild into portage! Yay, we got a sponsor
>> developer ;-)
>
> Yes, I'm willing to do this, I tried to find you later in the week at
> the conference to discuss how to do this, but failed.
>
> Point me at your ebuilds and I'll start working on getting them, and any
> changed ebuilds, checked in.

The official bug is; http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318365

However as you can see it for an old release. I'm using the attached
live version instead, as I'm helping with systemd's development I
update it daily, if not after every commit I notice here. You can
check out my notes so far at
http://barbieri-playground.googlecode.com/svn/gentoo/overlay/sys-apps/systemd/README.txt

Lennart should be doing a new release soon, so we can add a non-live
package based on it to avoid breakages.

NOTES:
  - although there are flags for audit, gtk and selinux, I never
changed those. My build is running with pam, tcpwrap and nosysv (maybe
turning those off may fail as well -- we need more testers).
   - we're using 2.6.36 features, actually with FANOTIFY support if
one plans to have read-ahead. As it was disabled in official 2.6.36
release, maybe we have a warning about it? Or just stick it in
CONFIG_CHECK?

One of the biggest problems so far to have it working is that "server"
packages (those that installed at /etc/init.d) either does not know
about systemd or auto-discover it, not being able to be told if it
should be used or not, not able to depend on it. This is quite bad, as
your dbus, consolekit, udev or others may or may not provide systemd
unit files.  Dbus is quite a good example, as you need dbus to install
systemd, then you need to re-emerge dbus to let it auto-discover
systemd and install its own units.

The way to fix it would be to provide a systemd use flag and then we
progressively patch ebuilds to forcefully install units and in such
case do not install /etc/init.d

In that front, we can also make systemd conflict with sysvinit or
other that implement virtual/init, so we can replace system binaries
like /sbin/reboot and friends with links to /bin/systemd.


>> > Third, NetworkManager (version 0.8) also calls OpenRC, but in this
>> > case it does hardcoded. In src/backends/NetworkManagerGentoo.c, it
>> > calls /etc/init.d/net.lo status to check if the lo interface is up. It
>> > would be nice to write a patch for NetworkManager with a configure
>> > option "--with-distro=systemd".
>>
>> Or use ConnMan, as it is faster and simpler ;-)
>
> A lot of us don't like ConnMan for a lot of good reasons (i.e. it does
> not work for our use cases.)  It also seems to be a dead-end of
> development and constantly plays catch-up for NetworkManager.  So, we
> can get this resolved in the NetworkManager ebuild to work and we should
> be fine.

I disagree with that, but pointless to debate it here.


> But you don't have to worry about it if you don't use it, no need to put
> extra work on you :)

sure.

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
http://profusion.mobi embedded systems
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MSN: barbieri at gmail.com
Skype: gsbarbieri
Mobile: +55 (19) 9225-2202