Recently, an article by Rich Felker called Broken by design: systemd has been making the rounds. While I am sympathetic with complaints about systemd, the problem is that this article is both more or less deliberately misleading and factually wrong in various of its sections. Normally I would pass over this (per the lesson of the famous xkcd strip), but not today for various reasons. I'll be quoting from the article to comment on specific issues I have with it.

(To hopefully avoid possible misunderstandings, I've written up my overall views of systemd and put them in a sidebar at the bottom of this entry.)

Felker more or less opens with:

My view is that this idea is wrong: systemd is broken by design, and despite offering highly enticing improvements over legacy init systems, it also brings major regressions in terms of many of the areas Linux is expected to excel: security, stability, and not having to reboot to upgrade your system.

To start with, when Felker talks about 'broken by design' and 'major regressions' he means both in a theoretical or philosophical sense; in other words he objects to how systemd is designed and feels that it is a bad idea. He does not point out anything that systemd fails at, can't do, or does wrong today in actual use. In practice systems running systemd have not been less secure or less stable and do not have to reboot to upgrade any more (or less) than non-systemd Linux systems do.

(Desktop Linux systems have increasingly been wanting to reboot after upgrades but this is driven by factors independent from systemd.)

On a hardened system without systemd, you have at most one root-privileged process with any exposed surface: sshd. Everything else is either running as unprivileged users or does not have any channel for providing it input except local input from root. Using systemd then more than doubles the attack surface.

Unfortunately this is false on a modern Linux system unless part of Felker's hardening involves disabling DBus and then fixing everything that stops working as a result of that. Any Linux system using DBus has a DBus daemon running as root, whether it is part of systemd or not, and that is a significant and user-accessible exposed surface (although only to local users). It may also expose DBus APIs for other root processes such as udev stuff.

(My understanding is that DBus has become essentially mandatory because udev wants to talk to it to broadcast hotplug events. Udev itself is deeply entwined in the modern Linux boot process to the point where removing it is less 'hardening your system' and more 'creating a new Linux distribution'.)

Update: I'm less and less confident of my understanding of how udev and DBus are linked to each other and how DBus runs. I may be wrong here about how necessary DBus is for udev and the security implications of DBus; this would mean that I'm wrong here and systemd offering DBus services is a real new exposure.

This increased and unreasonable risk is not inherent to systemd's goal of fixing legacy init. However it is inherent to the systemd design philosophy of putting everything into the init process.

I disagree with this view because I feel that a great deal of the increased attack surface systemd exposes is inherent in a number of core design decisions. Systemd is an active supervising init, so you must be able to somehow tell it to manipulate services (and load information about new ones). It holds service state in memory instead of trying to write status files on disk and keep them in sync; this implies you need a way of querying that service state. Systemd has further decided that unprivileged users can query that state, which means that unprivileged users can talk to it in general.

While systemd uses DBus for most or all of this I think that there is a serious argument that it is better to use a general core facility that a lot of people are paying a lot of attention to rather than reinvent the wheel on your own. A lot of people are worrying about the security and integrity of DBus and DBus libraries, many more than would be worrying about a systemd-specific protocol and set of message encoding and decoding code.

Unfortunately, by moving large amounts of functionality that's likely to need to be upgraded into PID 1, systemd makes it impossible to upgrade without rebooting. [...]

As Felker later admits, this is somewhere between 'factually incorrect' and 'aggressively misleading'. Systemd can and does serialize its state and re-exec itself during upgrades, and in practice this works reliably. My machines have upgraded systemd repeatedly without any kernel reboots involved (and this includes upgrades as drastic as Fedora version upgrades, eg from Fedora 19 to Fedora 20; yes I rebooted afterwards, but systemd was upgraded before then).

Yes, there are theoretical failure modes of this (as Felker agonizes about). I have a number of views on this but the simple version is that this problem exists in any other init system (most of which have been re-execing themselves on upgrades for years) and for any number of important system daemons as well as init. For example, if sshd fails to restart during an upgrade many servers are just as screwed as if init dies.

Felker also raises the issue of compatibility problems with the serialized state between an old and a new version. If it happened, this would be a distribution bug; when a distribution ships any upgrade it's that distribution's responsibility to make sure that the upgrade is compatible and won't make an upgraded system explode. Distributions have failed at this without systemd, but this is not a failure of what they are packaging, it is a failure of the distribution and their processes.

Many of the selling-point features of systemd are server-oriented. State-of-the-art transaction-style handling of daemon starting and stopping is not a feature that's useful on desktop systems. The intended audience for that sort of thing is clearly servers.

If you read the systemd design documents, this is clearly incorrect. One of systemd's explicit goals is to not start daemons on desktop systems until they're needed, especially heavyweight daemons like CUPS. If anything this is a drawback on servers, where people like me want to know right away on reboot if something is not going to work a day from now when someone tries to use it for the first time.

(Systemd's fast boot time due to starting services in parallel and various other tricks is also primarily a desktop advantage in my opinion, with perhaps a sideline in cloud virtual instances. Physical servers reboot infrequently and their boot is often drastically slowed down by the firmware's burning need to lovingly fondle ever bit of hardware in sight. Not that I'm grumpy about it or anything.)

The desktop is quickly becoming irrelevant. The future platform is going to be mobile and is going to be dealing with the reality of running untrusted applications. While the desktop made the unix distinction of local user accounts largely irrelevant, the coming of mobile app ecosystems full of potentially-malicious apps makes "local security" more important than ever.

The systemd developers disagree about the future irrelevance of the desktop, as do I. Beyond that, systemd has a significant amount of support for running services and other things in confined environments via use of Linux cgroups, something that is highly useful on both servers (for running daemons in lesser-privileged environments or with strong resource limits) and on desktops and other user machines for exactly this sort of untrusted applications.

None of the things systemd "does right" are at all revolutionary. They've been done many times before. DJB's daemontools, runit, and Supervisor, among others, have solved the "legacy init is broken" problem over and over again (though each with some of their own flaws). Their failure to displace legacy sysvinit in major distributions had nothing to do with whether they solved the problem, and everything to do with marketing. [...]

I disagree with this at sufficient length that I wrote an entire entry on why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't. The short version is that only Upstart has even been trying to do so.

If none of [of the alternate init systems] are ready for prime time, then the folks eager to replace legacy init in their favorite distributions need to step up and either polish one of the existing solutions or write a better implementation based on the same principles. Either of these options would be a lot less work than fixing what's wrong with systemd.

The final sentence is demonstrably false. Systemd works today on a great number of machines and the alternate init systems do not. Making the alternative init systems work would be a significant amount of effort, especially if you do as Felker advocates and completely replace the current init code to shove most of what init historically has done off to new programs. What might take 'a lot less work' for alternate init systems than systemd is changing them to fit Felker's vision of how init should work, a vision that is not how things work today even in System V init.

Felker does not make it clear if he thinks that legacy init even needs to be replaced (and there is certainly a contingent of people who feel that it doesn't need to be). I feel that System V init has a number of significant issues, issues that really do make a difference when managing systems. Other people seem to share this view given that major Linux distributions have moved to adopt other init systems (first with Upstart in Ubuntu, Fedora, and RHEL, and now with a move to systemd). And going outside of Linux, Solaris's SMF is the granddaddy of drastic modern init overhauls. Clearly this is an idea that has resonated with a lot of technical people over time.

(And as Felker forthrightly says, systemd offers 'highly enticing improvements over legacy init systems'.)

Sidebar: Smaller issues in Felker's article

Among the reasons systemd wants/needs to run as PID 1 is getting parenthood of badly-behaved daemons that orphan themselves, preventing their immediate parent from knowing their PID to signal or wait on them.

This is not the case. Systemd runs parts of itself as PID 1 because that is what an init system does. Systemd actually handles badly behaved daemon processes not through noticing when they are reparented to PID 1 but through Linux cgroups, which provide accurate tracking of what service a process belongs to.

In general inheriting the parentage of badly behaved daemon processes is useless for an init system because in standard Unix the init system has no way of figuring out what (abstract) service a random process it has just inherited is associated with or otherwise where it came from. In short, inits inherit random daemon processes only because they inherit all random processes.

(Why does PID 1 inherit orphan processes as opposed to something else happening to them? The ultimate answer is 'because that's how Unix works'.)

[...] While legacy init systems basically deal with no inputs except SIGCHLD from orphaned processes exiting and manual runlevel changes performed by the administrator, [...]

This is the case much of the time on modern servers but is not historically the case. One of init's major roles over time has been handling getty processes for the console and for serial connections, a role which involves a fair amount of complexity (for instance, most inits have had rate-limiting so that a broken getty or line wouldn't eat the system). And runlevel changes are actually a subset of the more general init-managed facilities exposed in /etc/inittab in System V init.

With that said, it's completely true that systemd deals with a lot more input sources than traditional System V init. Some of this is intrinsic in being an active supervision-based init system instead of a passive one like System V init, as an active init system must have some way of telling to manipulate services.

Sidebar: My overall views of systemd

I want to summarize my view of systemd to avoid misunderstandings. First, I feel that systemd is currently the best Linux init system from a sysadmin's perspective for reasons that I mostly covered in an earlier entry on things that systemd gets right. Second, I don't think that systemd is the ultimate init system (especially the ultimate Unixy init system). Instead I see it as part of Unix's necessary experimentation and growth. System V init is not flawless and systemd is one of a number of attempts to move the state of the art in init systems forward. We'll collectively learn from this over time and either improve systemd or come up with better solutions and replace it.