Hi, I just became aware that Arch Linux plans to switch to systemd, and this worries me for several reasons. I tried systemd a while ago in a brand new machine with Arch Linux and the boot was *much slower*. After some exchanges with Lennart Poettering and other people in Google+[1], it became clear I was on my own. Eventually I found the culprit: Fedora uses CONFIG_HZ_1000, and Arch Linux uses CONFIG_HZ_300. It became clear to me that systemd was not ready for prime time, it wasn't thoroughly tested in a lot of machines, and if you have problems Lennart Poettering will blame you (PulseAudio sounds familiar?). systemd was the reason I stopped using Fedora in the first place; when they moved to it my machine stopped booting reliably. My configuration was non-standard (a single encrypted partition), so I guess they never tested that. Similarly, I expect many Arch Linux users to bite these corner-cases. Finally, it's much harder to debug. If you have a problem you will not be able to open a script and figure out what is happening, and perhaps modify it, and debug it. You would be greeted with an unmodified binary, and the source code would be along these lines: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/src/remount-fs/remount-fs.c I'm sure in due time systemd will be ready, and will have nice advantages, but I doubt that's the case right now. Has anybody looked into the CONFIG_HZ issue? I doubt that. I was expecting more from the Arch Linux community, something along the lines of Google's analysis to pick to mercurial[2], but so far I have only seen a couple of people saying +1 in the development mailing list, with barely any explanation at all. Such an important move (one that might make users' machines stop booting) should warrant at least an analysis of some sort, with clear advantages. Would it not? At the moment I am unconvinced; does systemd has any *real* advantage? I don't think so; the potential of breakage outweighs the "supposed" advantages, and I think a proper analysis would show that. Cheers. [1] https://plus.google.com/108736516888538655285/posts/BTG39o6YoGS [2] http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis -- Felipe Contreras
