1. Mageia: systemd
Colin Guthrie
Mageia Contributor
Mageia Contributor

2. A little about...
...Me!!!

3. What is Mageia: Background
● Mandriva
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● Good, strong user community
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● Commercial problems
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● Mageia
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● Community focused, non-commercial
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● Most of the original community
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● Encourage commercial usage
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4. How Things Work
● Council
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● Various groups
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● Regular meetings
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● Try to be inclusive in terms of packages, but
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mindful of resources
● Ultimately... it’s a “Meritocracy”
●
–
– Those who do, decide
Those who do, decide

5. Pushing Changes
● Each cycle we propose changes
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● General review + vote
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● Then the fun begins!
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–
– Usually the week before freeze!
Usually the week before freeze!

6. Boot + Init
● Previously used sysvinit
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● Various experiments and toe-dipping to speed
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up boot performance
● More parallelisation
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● Start X11 early to improve perceived boot time
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● Early systemd packaged as an option
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7. Why systemd?
● See other talks!!
●
● Sysadmin
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● Clear up the mess of sysvinit/inittab/boiler-plate
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● Stateful tracking of services
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● Automatic restart on failure
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● Better tracking of service processes (cgroups)
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● Socket activation
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8. Mageia 2: systemd by default?
● Proposal to use systemd as default init
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● Proposal accepted o/
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● systemd (v44) is the default init in Mageia 2
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● sysvinit still supported as an option
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9. Issues Encountered
● Various technical issues encountered
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–
– Packaging helpers
Packaging helpers
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– Migrating service state on upgrade
Migrating service state
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– Forcing conversion to systemd on upgrade
Forcing conversion to systemd on upgrade
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– Ordering cycles and LSB headers
Ordering cycles headers
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– Nothing too troubling!
Nothing too troubling!

10. More Issues Encountered
● GUI Utilities and Installer
●
–
– Mageia (and Mandriva before) offer a “services”
Mageia (and Mandriva before) offer a “services”
GUI application during install and for administrators
GUI application and for administrators
post install
post install
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– Had to be converted to systemd but also support
Had to be converted to systemd but also support
sysvinit
sysvinit
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– Combination of “systemctl list-units”, “systemctl list-
Combination of “systemctl list-units”, “systemctl list-
unit-files” and “chkconfig --list”
unit-files” and “chkconfig --list”

11. Knock on Dependencies
● LVM + Device Enumeration
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–
– udev metadata more important
udev metadata more important
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– mkinitrd does not use udev /o
mkinitrd does not use udev /o
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– Solution? Use dracut o/
Solution? Use dracut o/
–
– Mageia 2 only supported systemd+dracut
Mageia 2 only supported systemd+dracut
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– mkinitrd+sysvinit still officially supported
mkinitrd+sysvinit still officially supported

12. Non-Technical Issues?
● Some minor FUD, but nothing significant
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● Overall, due to our QA team there were very
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few post-release complaints or problems
● Hard to judge accurately but ~90%+ users use
●
systemd

13. Upstream + X-Distro Engagement
● Good relationship upstream
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● Several fixes pushed upstream
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● Helped upstream QA
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● Very encouraging relationships with other
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distros
● Nice to see small differences disappearing
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14. What’s Next for Mageia?
● Mageia 3
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–
– Drop support for sysvinit + mkinitrd
Drop support for sysvinit mkinitrd
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– Implement the /usr move
Implement the /usr move
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– More disciplined packaging
More disciplined packaging
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● No udev rules in /etc
No udev rules in /etc
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● No tmpfiles configs in /etc
No tmpfiles configs in /etc

15. What’s Next for Mageia?
● Mageia 4
●
–
– Tidy up packaging rules
Tidy up packaging rules
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● No referencing of /bin, /sbin and /lib[64] in packaged files
No referencing of /bin, /sbin and /lib[64] in packaged files
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– Switch to Predictable Network Interface Names
Switch to Predictable Network Interface Names
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– Attempt to reduce packaging variations
Attempt to reduce packaging variations
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● Enabling/Restarting package on install/upgrade
Enabling/Restarting package on install/upgrade
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● Adopt Package Presets
Adopt Package Presets
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– Change how X (or $DISPLAYSERVER) starts
Change how X (or $DISPLAYSERVER) starts

16. What’s Next For Distributions?
????