Systemd as central control for the Linux system

Systemd is the result of the work of many developers, but, if there's a public face to be given to the software, it's certainly that of Lennart Poettering.

The valiant developer has already checked off a number of important projects on his to-do list, including Avahi and the PulseAudio sound system. With systemd, he's been working since 2010 on getting central services on a modern, uniform basis – emanating from a new approach for the init system.

Poettering doesn't shy away from unpopular decisions, which has earned him the reputation of using dictatorial methods. The decision to develop systemd only for Linux brought criticism, scorn, and insults. For him, meanwhile, the decision has a clearly understandable foundation.

Along with his work on systemd, Poettering is advocating for a unified Linux desktop. His newest project, which he's pursuing together with kernel guru Greg Kroah-Hartman, deals with integrating the Dbus message system as Kdbus in the kernel. His announcement at Google Plus [1] that systemd, together with Kdbus and all userspace tools in Fedora, starts without a problem and, thus, represents a new milestone, resulted in yet another hailstorm of harsh criticism.

Such opposition, however, has never diverted the Red Hat developer from his course (see the "Lennart Poettering Interview" box). He likes to speak his mind (Figure 1) as a free-thinker with enough backbone and support to see his vision through and perhaps remove a few old Linux relics.

Figure 1: Lennart Poettering's t-shirt shows his opinion on the sayings of Mark Shuttleworth.

To the Roots

If you're dealing with an init system, you very quickly recognize why working on this key component can cause so much turmoil. The term comes from "initiating" and encompasses, on Unix-like operating systems, the system startup and orderly shutdown.

Init is the first process the kernel generates, and it starts all other child processes. It's therefore assigned process ID 1 (PID 1). Among init's tasks are essentially starting all necessary services, mounting the filesystem, and setting up the network.

The SysVinit [2] init system used on Linux and other Unix derivatives since the 1990s was developed in 1988, when AT&T needed a start mechanism for its System V operating system in version R4.

In 2004, Solaris replaced SysVinit with its successor, Service Management Facility (SMF) [3], followed for the Mac OS X in 2005 by launchd [4]. Canonical has used Upstart [5], developed in-house based on SysVinit, since 2007. With Gentoo's FreeBSD offshoot, OpenRC [6] has been an alternative since 2007.

Born of Necessity

Systemd essentially comes from Red Hat developers Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers. Before the two set upon the task of remaking the init system under Linux in 2007, they took a close look at launchd and SMF, because these init systems provided parallel processing startup capabilities that the static SysVinit didn't have.

Because Upstart also had this ability, the original idea of the developers was to enhance Ubuntu's init system. Legal reasons that had to do with Canonical's Contributor License Agreement (CLA) [7] prohibited this – in that neither Poettering nor Sievers was willing to sign the agreement.

Thus, systemd was born of necessity. Two fundamental decisions of the time still raise hackles: Systemd was deliberately and without compromise designed for Linux only. Systems with other kernels such as BSD and Hurd simply stood on the sidelines; a porting to BSD was possible, but expensive.

The other decision grated against the old Unix principle of "one tool for one job" in that it set some of the jobs pretty close together. This may loosen up slightly in the future so that functions are available only individually, as Ubuntu currently does with Upstart in conjunction with logind.