Arch Linux is the fourth major Linux Distro after Fedora, Mageia and OpenSUSE that migrates to systemd as its Init System Manager. While systemd is not a dependency for Gnome, Gnome uses systemd-logind as a user login service in GDM with a fallback to Console-Kit when systemd is absent.
Of course the benefits for Arch from SysV to systemd are much more than a better Gnome support!
Stéphane Gaudreault said on Arch’ ML
Systemd has a overall better design than SysV, lots of useful administrative features and provide quicker boot up. Considering that it has been around in our repositories for some time and that it could be considered stable enough for production use, I would suggest to replace iniscript by systemd once the ‘Missing systemd units’ is over. Thus we will avoid duplicating our efforts on two init systems.
Any objections to start the migration process ?
However there weren’t any objections. On contrary Arch Team applause that move.
Jan de Groot respond
Go ahead. Maintaining 2 systems is a lot of duplicate work. Besides the duplicate work, you’ll get covered in patches trying to support setups that avoid installing something new.
Polkit is an example of this: we have a patch to make systemd optional at runtime, we request users to test it, and instead of testing it we end up with a 300+ posts thread about how bad Lennart is, with nearly no-one trying to investigate what is wrong about the patch and in which situations it doesn’t work.
Why SystemD
| sysvinit | Upstart | systemd | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interfacing via D-Bus | no | yes | yes |
| Shell-free bootup | no | no | yes |
| Modular C coded early boot services included | no | no | yes |
| Read-Ahead | no | no[1] | yes |
| Socket-based Activation | no | no[2] | yes |
| Socket-based Activation: inetd compatibility | no | no[2] | yes |
| Bus-based Activation | no | no[3] | yes |
| Device-based Activation | no | no[4] | yes |
| Configuration of device dependencies with udev rules | no | no | yes |
| Path-based Activation (inotify) | no | no | yes |
| Timer-based Activation | no | no | yes |
| Mount handling | no | no[5] | yes |
| fsck handling | no | no[5] | yes |
| Quota handling | no | no | yes |
| Automount handling | no | no | yes |
| Swap handling | no | no | yes |
| Snapshotting of system state | no | no | yes |
| XDG_RUNTIME_DIR Support | no | no | yes |
| Optionally kills remaining processes of users logging out | no | no | yes |
| Linux Control Groups Integration | no | no | yes |
| Audit record generation for started services | no | no | yes |
| SELinux integration | no | no | yes |
| PAM integration | no | no | yes |
| Encrypted hard disk handling (LUKS) | no | no | yes |
| SSL Certificate/LUKS Password handling, including Plymouth, Console, wall(1), TTY and GNOME agents | no | no | yes |
| Network Loopback device handling | no | no | yes |
| binfmt_misc handling | no | no | yes |
| System-wide locale handling | no | no | yes |
| Console and keyboard setup | no | no | yes |
| Infrastructure for creating, removing, cleaning up of temporary and volatile files | no | no | yes |
| Handling for /proc/sys sysctl | no | no | yes |
| Plymouth integration | no | yes | yes |
| Save/restore random seed | no | no | yes |
| Static loading of kernel modules | no | no | yes |
| Automatic serial console handling | no | no | yes |
| Unique Machine ID handling | no | no | yes |
| Dynamic host name and machine meta data handling | no | no | yes |
| Reliable termination of services | no | no | yes |
| Early boot /dev/log logging | no | no | yes |
| Minimal kmsg-based syslog daemon for embedded use | no | no | yes |
| Respawning on service crash without losing connectivity | no | no | yes |
| Gapless service upgrades | no | no | yes |
| Graphical UI | no | no | yes |
| Built-In Profiling and Tools | no | no | yes |
| Instantiated services | no | yes | yes |
| PolicyKit integration | no | no | yes |
| Remote access/Cluster support built into client tools | no | no | yes |
| Can list all processes of a service | no | no | yes |
| Can identify service of a process | no | no | yes |
| Automatic per-service CPU cgroups to even out CPU usage between them | no | no | yes |
| Automatic per-user cgroups | no | no | yes |
| SysV compatibility | yes | yes | yes |
| SysV services controllable like native services | yes | no | yes |
| SysV-compatible /dev/initctl | yes | no | yes |
| Reexecution with full serialization of state | yes | no | yes |
| Interactive boot-up | no[6] | no[6] | yes |
| Container support (as advanced chroot() replacement) | no | no | yes |
| Dependency-based bootup | no[7] | no | yes |
| Disabling of services without editing files | yes | no | yes |
| Masking of services without editing files | no | no | yes |
| Robust system shutdown within PID 1 | no | no | yes |
| Built-in kexec support | no | no | yes |
| Dynamic service generation | no | no | yes |
| Upstream support in various other OS components | yes | no | yes |
| Service files compatible between distributions | no | no | yes |
| Signal delivery to services | no | no | yes |
| Reliable termination of user sessions before shutdown | no | no | yes |
| utmp/wtmp support | yes | yes | yes |
| Easily writable, extensible and parseable service files, suitable for manipulation with enterprise management tools | no | no | yes |
*the above features might be a bit old
Upstart is Ubuntu’s Init Manager, developed and maintained by Canonical, it was the previous Fedora’s Init Manager and it is used also (as far as I know) in Google Chrome OS.
There were some discussions (that I cannot find), for making systemd a Gnome3 dependency, but they dropped that. Systemd -for now- it is known to work only in Linux kernels. Not Unix/BSD.
By the way
Arch Linux is not a user-friendly distro. Till you set it up for first time, you have to spend some time in its Wiki. If you are Linux DE enthusiasts you have DEFINITELY try it. It has the best documentation that you will ever find in a distro and an amazing qualified community. Just give it a try!
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