On Thu, 25.11.10 17:33, Tomas Mraz (tmraz@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > Actually it's true, but in the near future all standard cron jobs > > might be runned by systemd > > > > http://0pointer.de/public/systemd-man/systemd.timer.html > > > > It's not 100 % cron replacement now, but who knows what the future holds :) > > To add some argument to my previous sarcasm. I do not think that it > makes any sense to replicate cron functionality in systemd. Either you > replicate half of it and then you still need to run crond for the rest > or you replicate it completely. But in that case what is the saving over > the separate daemon? I'm sorry but I do not think that crond is anything > that "optimized out" by inclusion can improve performance of Linux > desktop/server/whatever. I do not say that cronie code cannot be > improved - it definitely can - but it does not make any sense to > reimplement it from scratch. crond is not particularly complex. And providing similar functionality in systemd is relatively easy as the more complicated stuff cron does is actually spawning the processes, and systemd is vastly more powerful with that. i.e. you can set IO/CPU schedulers, get sane logging, get all the cgroups niftyness, you can pull in extra deps, yadda yadda. Also, what's particularly interesting is that you can combine various triggers if you do this in systemd: i.e. have one timer-based trigger, and one inotify trigger (i.e. .path unit), and they start the same job, and you don't end up with duplicates and need locking. And also, cron does a couple of really nasty things. For example it wakes up in regular intervals to check if a job is ready to run. It does so to deal with wallclock time changes/suspends. In systemd we are working on a different way to solve this, so that we can actually sleep as long as possible, and don't have to wake up in regular intervals. Also, this means we can have much more accurate time specifications, and we don't have to pay a price for it, due to this. This different design will even allow us to do amazing stuff that hasn't existed so far, for example, mark cron jobs so that they wake up the machine from suspend, and similar. To summarize this: the current logic of cron is not pretty. And it duplicates process spawning and babysitting which already exists in way too many daemons, and is actually the more interesting code. systemd unifies all that code, and the end result will be simpler, more powerful and less code, since we reuse what already exists anyway. The only thing we basically add to systemd is a parser for calendar events, and everything else already exists. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
