I’m no Linux expert, but I’ve never had any problems with sudo, it just works. Shouldn’t systemd have higher priorities on their mind? This feels like change for the sake of change. And if this does happen, I sincerely hope that it just works, like sudo.
I think the article (or more Lennart Poertting post) explains it quite nicely. The problem with sudo is that the sudo binary itself has the ability to gane elevated privileges which is a potential attack surface
Systemd isn’t just an init system. It is a project with low level building blocks for a distribution. Most of the complaints are that it isn’t just an init system, while it’s not meant to be just an init system.
sudo is already an optional component (yes, really—I don’t have it installed). Don’t want its attack surface? You can stick with su and its attack surface instead. Either is going to be smaller than systemd’s.
systemd’s feature creep is only surpassed by that of emacs.
The problem is that those modules are packaged by the developers as opt-out rather than opt-in. It’s a variation on Microsoft’s old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook, only the “extinguish” part hasn’t worked so well because there are some stubborn distros whose needs don’t align with what systemd provides and have maintainers that go out of their way to provide alternatives.
(By contrast, although we may joke about emacs, it’s the myriad of third-party extensions that cause it to just about be its own operating system—it doesn’t all ship with the core.)
I’m not a fan of having root be able to actually login.
Even more so in a true multiuser env where I would rather have privilege escalation be more granular (certain user/groups can esculate certain actions but not others, maybe even limit options of a cmd).
Granted, in a true multiuser environment with an admin who’s carefully tailoring /etc/sudoers to make sure everyone has the least possible privileges that will allow them to still do what they need, sudo is more secure. There’s no doubt of that.
On a machine that has only one human user who’s also the admin, and retains the default sudo-with-user-passwords configuration, su vs sudo is pretty much a wash, security-wise. su requires a second password to get root access, but sudo times out and requires the password to be re-entered while a shell created by su can stay open indefinitely. Which is more easily broken will depend on other details of your situation.
(If you’re running an incorrectly configured ssh server that allows direct root login with only password authentification, having a root password could contribute to problems, but the correct fix there is to reconfigure the ssh server not to do something so stupid. I hope there’s no distro that still ships that way out of the box.)
What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, Systemd/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Systemd + Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Systemd system made useful by the Systemd corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX
So I don’t even use systemd myself I run OpenRC. Yet honestly I find the idea quite intriguing, having the service manager (PID 1) invoke the command seems like a cool idea to me.
It’s not really a sudo alternative as much as it is another way of doing something similar.
However, distributions like Fedora will definitely be in the lead, judging by previous experiences and stories of adapting new Linux technologies and Systemd components.
I wonder if this is still true, now that he no longer works for RedHat, but Microsoft.
A lot (and I mean a lot) of criticism can be leveled at systemD. One of the upsides of it becoming popular is the standardization of much of things from the developers’ perspective. It’s easier to target multiple distros when you can rely on systemD’s single implementation of the feature. Over the next decade, I forsee systemD eating more and more of the userspace, until you are only left with managing the differences between DEs and which display server they are using. We’re already headed towards immutable base systems with apps shipping with their own dependencies, which we reduce the differences between distros even further.
If Canonical and RedHat weren’t backing different horses (Snap vs Flatpak), I could see the app containerization system coming under systemD as well fairly soon. The Cosmic DE project uses functionality from systemD to overlay changes onto the system that are reversible, so that alpha versions of Cosmic can be tested without permanently changing the base system. Imagine apps shipping on whatever container runtime, and dynamically overlaying system-level changes as needed for things that tap into the host system via systemd-sysext.
Well… Poettering will eventually work his way up to browser engines and then we’ll get something efficient… Here’s the announcement:
"There’s a new component in systemd, called “engined”. Or actually, it’s not a new component, it’s actually the long existing “WebKit” engine now done properly. The engine is also a lot more fun to use than “WebKit” or “Blink” because you can finally have hundreds of tabs open in your browser without running out of RAM.
But for why (I’m commenting this before reading) wouldn’t it make more sense to home I’m the scope of systemd so it can be easier to maintain? Why have it do everything?
Why do you consider it as poisoning? I’ve heard the argument about not doing things the traditional Linux way (binary logs for example). But if the alternative provides so many benefits, why is it an issue? Systemd is a piece of cake for all parties compared to sysvinit and alternatives, so why is it bad when it solves so many issued, and makes it super easy to use by just adding e.g. a new option to a Unit?
Another example: timers are more complex than cronjobs, but timers offer additional needed features like dependencies, persistence, easy and understandable syntax, and more. So although more complex, once you get the hang of them, they’re a very welcomed feature imo
By itself, solely doing init, it would have been fine, however, binary logging (even if you eventually end up with a text log, that’s wasting disk space on a binary format no one wants or needs), and it didn’t stop there. He keeps replacing Linux subsystem after subsystem, and many of those replacements are not progress, just duplication of effort and creates more ways for configuration drift.
Here is the rationale for the Journal. In short it is really not that simple and it has a lot of advantages over simple text files and it saves disk space.
You can still forward to text syslog or to a central logging server like Loki if working with multiple hosts. I still don’t get the issue with binary logs.
Yes, and many distros have that out of the box… But they don’t have it sent to keep the binary journal as close to empty as possible. So you end up with twice the space in use for logs. As for the issue with binary logs, text logs can be read by far more tools and utilities, rather than just journalctl and pipes.
You can set the space limit for journals logs really low then, to avoid double space usage. As for the last argument, that also was an issue for me years ago because not all tools were compatible with the journald format, but that’s since long fixed now and I’ve not experienced any issue for a long time. Journal logs provide a standard format for all applications, so third party tools don’t need to be compatible with every log format of your applications. And it also comes with great additional features like -b or --since etc. So I still don’t get the issue here
I was arguing how it is a very useful tool with many great additions, rather than rely on the: “no old better!” reply based on ignorance. But it looks like your replies have turned full removed, so no point in continuing here to try and educate you.
Text is compatible with all the grep, awk, sed, text editors, what have you. As for the argument of it binary saving space, not on modern filesystems with compression, like zfs, btrfs, and bcachefs. The entire resistance against tampering is bogus, any systems where that is a concern already live scrape logs to an off server indexing service. If you are concerned about poorly formatted logs, that is an application configuration issue. Address it directly with the application. There are no benefits to a binary log, especially when journalctl is absolutely no faster at jumping to the end of the long log than standard less is. Poettering has you chasing phantoms. He always does. He’s like the politician who justifies horrible bills by saying it’s to protect the children.
systemd is more of a set of products and software components branded under a single name rather than a single thing.
systemd itself is rather simple, as most other pieces systemd-* software, like systemd-boot, systemd-networkd and systemd-resolvd. these are usually more stable and less bloated than more popular alternatives
As long as they can work independently, yes. If they are modular and a distro admin (or just a computer admin) can choose to install and use systemd-x but not install or use systemd-y, we are in good business
Now if you have to take a few you don’t like or need to use so that the one component you do want works, then no
I honestly don’t know enough of systemd to say either way
I can understand that it makes it easier to add changes that would benefit systemd and distros in general. I read that they introduced run0 to solve long shortcomings of sudo (I’m not aware of which). That sounds logical.
You can’t think of it a single massive project. It’s actually lots of small components.
We could argue the linux kernel is bloated too. The reality is though, provided the project is designed to be modular (as SystemD is), it actually makes sense to keep it together, to ensure there is a standard base and all the components are synchronised fully with their API’s.
In practice, all those tight coupling between components mean that it behaves more or less monolithic, despite the claims to the contrary. Replacing them with alternatives is a pain because something else breaks or some software has a hard dependency on it.
You can pluralize without the apostrophe. In fact, you never need an apostrophe to pluralize.
It also saves distro’s a lot of effort.
Only if they want to break free.
And they don’t need nfsroot or a separate consolidated /usr mount or, really, a whole host of things that lennart didnt understand and unilaterally broke like an arrogant noob.
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