[systemd-devel] Log of all processes

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 6:27 AM, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
<barbieri at profusion.mobi> wrote:
[...]
> Hi, I'm one of the guys helping Systemd to run on Gentoo and had
> similar high-pid counts.

Hi Gustavo.

> The biggest cause of problems was hotplug being installed. Alone it
> would account for over 1000 pid. Removing it, but still leaving the
> uevent helper set in kernel (CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH!="") was still
> causing high pid count, but faster boot (the kernel would create
> process but not find the binary and thus they'd die).   Hotplug was
> installed since it was recommended by some gentoo handbook, but as you
> can see from the version (2004-something) it's deprecated and udev
> handles it all, much more nicely.

I tought I din't have to do anything, because I haven't used hotplug
in a long time, I uninstalled it years ago. However, I had the
CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH still set, and that was the cause of the
higher PID count. Now I have <100 for emergency, and ~500 for
graphical.target.

> The second problem was calling openrc scripts at /etc/init.d, as
> openrc is too smart and tries to manage dependencies that may have
> been handled by systemd already. So I disable it in my ebuild (see
> below). With that I disable all access to /etc/init.d and have a fully
> native systemd (you can find some service files in my repo as well).

I'm using a (slightly modified) version of your ebuilds. I don't use
any script from OpenRC.

> The third, but very minor is to remove gentoo's intelligence from udev
> rules. Things like "new network device -> /etc/init.d/net.$iface
> start" or "new bluetooth, start bluez". These are also documented in
> the link below.

Done that too.

> Last but not least, I'm a desktop user and as such I don't care about
> persistent logs. Systemd allows you to run with a very lightweight
> bridge to link /dev/log to /dev/kmsg, then you can read your logs with
> "dmesg" and they're all in ram, with no need to install logrotate
> stuff. It's very lightweight (36kb here). I also disable all getty but
> 1 and start my login manager directly (slim.service, instead of
> xdm.service). It boots into my Enlightenment17 with pid around 500,
> with a hack to ignore some acpid udev modprobes I can get it to 300).

I use GNOME, so my PID count is higher (~900), but I'm OK with that. I
use syslog-ng out of custom, and that doesn't slow things down.

> I have a "live" (from git) systemd ebuild, with instructions I'm collecting at:

I'm using a modified version of your ebuilds (thanks by the way).

> As for shutdown, yeah, it's as fast as it should be ;-) We're doing an
> amazing work with systemd! My next hope is to have the cron features
> in it and it's all I ever need to manage my system.

I'm quite happy with systemd right now; it's not incredible faster
that OpenRC, but I have a lot of services running. My boot time is
around 24s to gdm login screen, and then my GNOME session takes
another 10s to be able to use my desktop. Need to look into that.

Regards, and thanks again for the ebuilds (and to everyone else that answered).
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Instituto de Matemáticas
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México