libinit idea

[Don Lewis]

On 24 Feb, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> from Don Lewis:
> 
>> I've got a Fedora server here that has systemd and I've come to
>> dislike it.  It seems to be one of those "Do not open.  No user
>> serviceable parts inside." sorts of things.
>   
>> I was never able to get it to start NUT properly.
>   
>> More often than not, it fails to come up multi-user.  The machine has
>> a large number of disks (mostly JFS and XFS) attached to it, and even
>> after what I think should be a clean shutdown, it seems to want to
>> fsck a bunch of them. Unfortunately, there seems to be some sort of
>> timeout on that, so a bunch get skipped and then don't get mounted. 
>> I have to manually fsck everything in single user mode.  Then if I
>> reboot, it
>> *might* come up properly.  I haven't been able to find any knobs to
>> adjust the timeout.  Sometimes, there is just a message that says
>> something like "an error occurred" at the top of the screen, just
>> before the prompt for the single-user password, with no clue as to
>> what it is unhappy about.
> 
>> Emergency shutdown can also be a problem.  If I'm around when the
>> power fails, I manually try to shut down the machine before the UPS
>> battery runs down.  I don't have the screen on the UPS, so I hit the
>> power button and cross my fingers that the machine will make it
>> through the clean shutdown sequence in time.  It seems to take
>> forever (many minutes) and I have no idea what the heck it is
>> spending all of its time on.
> 
>> The documentation seems to be very sparse.
> 
>> My plan is to migrate this function to a FreeBSD server.
> 
> This looks scandalously slow.  It reminds me of the time with OS/2
> Warp 4 in the late 1990s when I had to close Netscape web browser in
> preparation for shutdown, and it took 15 minutes because it was a hog
> for memory, by late 1990s standards.  I had 20 MB RAM, not bad for
> those days.
> 
> What would happen if you typed at the command prompt
> shutdown -r now
> or
> shutdown -p now
> ?
> Would it take seemingly forever?

In Linux-land "shutdown -h now" does what our "shutdown -p now" does.
For whatever reason, doing shutdown that way seems faster.  That's not
so handy for me in the power loss case because the machine is running X
and is most likely sitting in the screensaver.  Switching to another
vty, doing a root login, and typing in the shutdown command is a lot of
typing to get right while flying blind without a monitor.

There might also be a slowdown due to the network being down, though
it's hard to tell in my case.  I'm also not using NFS, which would be
the obvious culprit.

I forgot to mention that the command line tools are feel cumbersome.  To
restart a service:
	FreeBSD:   /etc/rc.d/foo restart
	Old Linux: /etc/init.d/foo restart
	Systemd:   systemctl restart foo.service
seems worse that that when I'm actually typing it ...

> Would it take seemingly forever?
> 
> I would like to try systemd in Linux, can't say at this stage whether
> I'll like it, hate it, or somewhere in between.

There's no substitute for firsthand experience.