Heya, today I installed the current Fedora 30 Workstation beta on my new laptop. It was a bumpy ride, I must say (the partitioner (blivet?) crashed five times or so on me, always kicking me out of anaconda again, just because I wanted to undo something). But I don't really want to discuss that. What I do want to discuss is this: Can we maybe reduce the default set of packages a bit? In particular the following ones I really don't think should be in our default install: 1. multipathd. On a workstation, uh?? I obviously have no multipath devices configured on my laptop, how would I even? Has anyone? This is a really nasty one: to this day it pulls in udev settle, which is really backwards, and slows down our boot considerably. No current daemon should require udev settle, any daemon that still does is just backwards because it assumes that hardware would guarantee to have shown up at some specific time at boot, though in today's world that's really not how this works: hardware can take any time it wants, and thus instead of "waiting for everything" you can reasonably just wait for the stuff you know you actually need, based on your configuration. systemd-udev-settle.service however is a compat kludge that is supposed to provide "wait for everything", though this is racy and flaky. To say this clearly: anything that still relied on systemd-udev-settle.service 5y ago was bad, but still pulling that in today in 2019, and doing that in a default fedora install is just bad bad bad. This alone costs half the boot time on my system because it just waits for stuff for nothing, and for what? And beyond that, this daemon is really ugly too: it logs at high log levels during boot that it found no configuration and hence nothing to do. Yes, obviously, but that's a reason to shut up and proceed quickly, not to complain loudly about that so that it even appears on the scren (I mean srsly, this is the first thing I saw when i booted from the fedora live media: a log message printed all over the screen that multipathd has no working configuration...). 2. dmraid. Not quite as bad as multipathd as it is more likely to exist on a workstation (still quite exotic though), but also pulls in udev settle and hence should not be in our default boot. Much like multipathd this should be fixed to not require udev settle anymore, and in the absence of that at least not end up in the default fedora boot process, except for those people who actually have dmraid. 3. atd? Do we still need that? Do we have postinst scripts that need this? If so, wouldn't systemd-run be a better approach for those? Isn't it time to make this an RPM people install if they want it? 4. Similar crond. On my fresh install it's only used by "zfs-fuse", which I really wonder why it even is in the default install? And "mdadm" wants this too. (which would be great if it would just use timer units) 5. libvirtd. Why is this running? Can't we make this socket activatable + exit-on-idel? While I am sure it's useful on workstations why run it all the time, given that only very few users probably actually need that, and if they do starting it on demand would be much more appropriate? On my freshly installed system it is running all the time even though there are no VMs or anything around. Ideally, the top 4 wouldn't be installed at all anymore (in case of the first two at least on the systems which do not need them). But if that's not in the cards, it would be great to at least not enable these services anymore in the default boot so that they are only a "systemctl enable" away for people who need them? I wonder the first one is rooted in a misconception about systemd's unit condition concept: conditions are extremely lightwight: they just bypass service start-up, that's all. They have no effect on whether dependencies are pulled in before hand or not, and they are only tested the instant the service is ready to be fork()ed off. This means multipathd.service (which has ConditionPathExists=/etc/multipathd.conf) pulls in systemd-udev-settle.service regardless if the condition holds or fails... I guess I should file bz issues about all of the above, but I am not sure against which packages? anaconda? comps (does that still exist)? the individual packages? It's also my hope that maybe some champion volunteers for tracking down issues like this and fixing them? i.e. keeping udev settle out of the default install alone would be a worthy goal for every release, given that it doubles boot time on typical systems... Anyone up for that? Lennart _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
