[Semibug] SystemD is literally the kitchen sink of Linux ; Linux starting to feel more and more alien as the years go on

[Kyle Willett]

Replying to Steve,
<If you guys know anything about OpenBSD having a good, hardware
assisted VM mechanism, I'd love to hear about it.>

OpenBSD has a built-in VM platform called VMM now.  Personally I think it
is going to be the answer to lack of wine and the removal of the Linux
emulator, but also again personally, I don't think it is there yet.

It lacks a graphical framebuffer having to resort to using x11 forwarding
to get graphical applications to work, and it is stuck on being single
threaded.  That first point is the real sticking point and teh second one
was more of a minor issue.

The VMM/VMD situation is not as advanced as Bhyve in FreeBSD even rather
yet KVM that runs the public clouds, but it is getting better.

So while it may not meet your needs today, look into it in the future!

There is a hosting company that when my current hosting contract expires
will get my business called OpenBSD Amsterdam or OpenBSD AMS for short.
They have some older Dell servers running VMM guests on them for people to
host their own websites and stuff.  I could be wrong but I believe Solene
R, a European lady, hosts her dataswamp website on OpenBSD AMS, she is the
one that puts out the excellent OpenBSD webzine.

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/
https://webzine.puffy.cafe/issue-16-special-octopenbsd-2023.html

Regards,
Kyle

On Thu, Dec 7, 2023 at 1:59 AM Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:

> Kyle Willett said on Wed, 6 Dec 2023 15:59:51 -0600
>
> >https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-255
> >
> >Read this article on a slow day at work and yes I realize there are
> >distros other than RHEL like Gentoo that use OpenRC, but work uses
> >RHEL.
> >
> >I used FreeBSD for the first time around 2004-2006. It was version 4
> >or 5 something. (I don't know if I still have the CD sets to tell).
> >It has largely stayed the same.  Just steady improvements.
> >
> >I started using OpenBSD in 2019 and while it sees incredible changes;
> >the way the user interacts with the system is largely unchanged.
> >
> >Linux on the other hand is so alien from 2004! Back when Linux ran 2.4
> >series kernels and the early 2.6 series it was a cool OS.
> >
> >Now to quote the article: "Most internal process tracking is now using
> >PIDFDs rather than PIDs when running on a supported kernel."  What the
> >heck is a PIDFD instead of a PID.  All Unix users know what a PID is
> >it is universal but Linux has to be different.
> >
> >Since Microsoft and Red Hat and other big companies have gotten so
> >heavily invested in Linux development it has lost its heart and soul.
>
> Obviously this is a problem. And this whole Freedesktop.Org thing is an
> atrocity.
>
> Systemd is absolutely unique in this list of problems. It's an obvious
> attempt at vendor lock-in. It's outrageously difficult to rip out
> systemd and replace it with another init system, because systemd's
> tenticles are everywhere and Redhat/IBM money is influencing software
> authors to write their software with for systemd PID1 only: No other
> init systemd need apply. Systemd is a huge black box of massively
> entangled mess, not troubleshootable by a normal computer expert.
>
> There are plenty of massively entangled messes out there. KDE is one: I
> kicked all KDE programs and libraries off my computer in 2015 because
> it's a black box of gratuitous entanglements. But notice the
> difference: I was able to kick KDE off my computer. If your computer
> came with systemd, you don't have that luxury. Allow me to draw a BNF
> for that (I'm in a BNF mood today):
>
> entangled_messes ::= systemd | other_messes
> other_messes ::= KDE | Pulseaudio | dbus | voluminous_browsers
> voluminous_browsers ::= firefox | chromium | epiphany
>
> Everything above can easily be removed or replace except systemd and
> maybe dbus, but so far dbus' role can be minimized. Systemd is in a
> class by itself.
>
> I was a Debian guy in 2014 when Debian decided to switch to systemd, so
> I knew I needed to jump distros very soon, because my whole business
> depended on my Linux desktop machine. It was slim pickings back then. My
> short list was:
>
> Gentoo
> Funtoo
> Devuan (not written yet)
> OpenBSD
> Void Linux
>
> A little fooling around ruled out Gentoo and Funtoo. Installations
> could be hours, demanding a lot of user intervention, and the install
> could fail if you compiled your kernel wrong.
>
> Devuan wasn't written yet, and besides, I considered the Debian distro
> and Debian community such trash that I didn't want to depend on a
> distro that depended on Debian.
>
> I was settling down with the idea of OpenBSD. I'd used it on a laptop
> in 2007, and it was nice. Subjectively, it was solid. No glitches,
> freezes, indeterminacies, or other BS. Xfce was a white knuckle, "hope
> it works this time" experience on Debian, but on OpenBSD it was rock
> solid and consistent every time.
>
> I should mention I tried FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Dragonfly, and just
> couldn't get them installed. I know other people's experiences are
> different, but I couldn't install them, and if you can't install it,
> you can't use it. So as far as BSD, for me OpenBSD was the only game in
> town.
>
> By autumn 2014 I'd settled on switching to OpenBSD, and was excited
> about it. I attended a talk by an OpenBSD expert at a conference, and
> asked him a question about a show-stopping need of mine. I asked him if
> OpenBSD had a *hardware assisted* VM like Linux' excellent qemu. I had
> tried qemu on OpenBSD, and it was so slow it was like being on a 300
> baud modem. His answer to the question: No.
>
> I went on the OpenBSD mailing list and asked if they were working on a
> hardware assisted VM. Nobody other than Theo said no, and there never
> would be because it's a security risk. OK, his distro, his rules. But
> here's my situation: No matter what distro or OS you choose, there will
> be vital programs that don't have packages and are unbuildable or are
> crashy. For those, you need to run them in a VM built for them (I think
> this was before stuff like Docker). I hate systemd on my desktop that
> operates my business, but I have no problem with it on a Ubuntu or
> Debian VM whose job is to host 3 or 4 programs that can't run on my
> native setup. But I need that ability or my business could shut down.
> Indeed, the first 9 months after I switched to Void Linux, I had to
> host the process by which my eBooks were personalized on a Ubuntu VM.
> Can you imagine if I hadn't been able to sell books for nine months?
>
> I switched to Void Linux in the spring or summer of 2015, and have been
> there since. It's a close to the metal, no training wheels Linux distro
> that can be set up with no frills at all, which is how I like it.
>
> Somewhere in the early 2020's I heard a rumor that OpenBSD now had
> their own VM system that had hardware assistance and was as fast as
> Qemu on Linux. But I've also heard from OpenBSD experts that OpenBSD
> still has no hardware assisted VM mechanism.
>
> Obviously nothing I've said is relevant if I were just hosting http(s),
> smtp, dns, dhcp, and maybe (or maybe not) Jitsi. But when you use
> hundreds of different programs every week, you'd better have a good VM
> to run business critical programs that don't run on your metal-mounted
> OS.
>
> If you guys know anything about OpenBSD having a good, hardware
> assisted VM mechanism, I'd love to hear about it.
>
> Thanks,
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
>
> Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
>
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