Systemd - FOSDEM 06 #

As sort of a “go out of your comfort zone and discover new stuff” exercise I went to the systemd – two years later talk next. It’s just plain amazing to see a machine boot in roughly one second (that is not counting the 7s that the BIOS needs for initialization). The whole project started as a init-only project but has since grown to a much larger purpose: An init platform ranging from mobile, embedded, desktop devices to servers many features were just over-due across the board.

Essentially the event-based system brings together what was split and duplicated before in things like console-kit, sysVinit, initscripts, inetd, pm-utils, acpid, syslog, watchdog services, cgrulesd, cron and atd. It brings support for event based container spawning, suspending and shutdown which brings whole new opportunities for optimisations. In addition for the first time in the history of Linux there is the possibility of grouped resource management: Instead of having nice levels bound to processes you now can group services to cgroups and give them guaranteed resources (which makes resource management of e.g multiple Apache processes plus some MySQL instances all running on the same machine so much easier).

(Post kindly proof-read and corrected by Thilo Fromm)