Systemd Alternatives

systemd reviews and mentions

• Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jun 2025

  Is this a reference to https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5644#issuecomment-... ?

• Replacing Kubernetes with Systemd
  20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 May 2025

  ah maybe there's a fully rootless option recently too

  https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/30239

• SystemD ParticleOS
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Apr 2025

  Personally, it's not that the alternatives are so awesome.

  It's when i meet against some awful design choices in systemd, like how it decides to wait forever rather than hard fail, and by wait forever, i mean wait for 30 seconds, no, 1 minute 30 seconds, no 5 minutes... you get it.

  Or you can easily lock yourself out when there's a typo in /etc/fstab.

  Or the hardcoded 5 minute timeout for sysv-generator: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/src/sysv-genera...

  God forbid you used cgroupsv1 for anything when poettering unilaterally decided to punish everyone with a 30 second delay for using it.

  If you stray off of the intended opinionated path, be prepared for the least user-friendly experience linux has to offer. You might even get some abuse from the developers if you try to ask for help, but they've probably toned it down since CoC became a thing (I hope).

• Deploying a Simple Go API with Supervisor and Nginx
  1 project | dev.to | 19 Mar 2025

  You might wonder why we use Supervisor instead of alternatives like Systemd, PM2, or containerized solutions like Docker. Here’s a quick comparison:

• Stupid Smart Pointers in C
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Mar 2025

  > You cannot use it for values that you want to return from the function

  I would say this is only half true. With some macro magic you can actually also return the values :)

  https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/0201114bb7f347015ed4...

  To be fair though, you probably meant without any such shenanigans.

• Show HN: Krep a High-Performance String Search Utility Written in C
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2025

  tbf this is a really common pitfall and arguably a design mistake in Linux/POSIX, opening files should be a straightforward operation without pitfalls. Even established programs mess this up all the time, see https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/30690 and https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole/issues/363

• Running Systemd-Nspawn Containers
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2025

  It looks like systemd-nspawn is gaining rootless support, see https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/30239

  Until then, I'm not sure if there is anything lightweight. If you don't need lightweight, there is Podman.

• IPv6 Is Hard
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2025

  As per the article mentions of resolving AAAA IPv6 records, a feature was just merged into Linux's systemd-resolved last week.

  https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/34165

  So you can do.

  RefuseRecordTypes=AAAA

  So there, your DNS won't ever query for IPv6 AAAA records.

  (in fact you can refuse any DNS questions like MX, SRV, TXT as well with:

  RefuseRecordTypes=MX SRV TXT)

  Note - I started adding that feature because some applications were "misbehaving" and querying AAAA records when IPv6 stack was disabled.

• C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2025

  On Linux, a privileged process can change the memory address which the kernel (/proc filesystem) reads argv/etc from... prctl(PR_SET_MM) with the PR_SET_MM_ARG_START/PR_SET_MM_ARG_END arguments. Likewise, with PR_SET_MM_ENV_START/PR_SET_MM_ENV_END.

  The API is ugly, and since it needs CAP_SYS_RESOURCE many programs can't use it... but systemd does: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/2635b5dc4a96157c2575...

  This shouldn't cause the kind of race conditions we are talking about here, since it isn't changing a single arg, it is changing the whole argv all at once. However, the fact that PR_SET_MM_ARG_START/PR_SET_MM_ARG_END are two separate prctl syscalls potentially introduces a different race condition. If Linux would only provide a prctl to set both at once, that would fix that. The reason it was done this way, is the API was originally designed for checkpoint-restore, in which case the process will be effectively suspended while these calls are made.

• The Motivation Behind Systemd
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jan 2025

  The article doesn't even mention this: systemd is not well written software, and far from behaving robust and consistently. Take some time, look through the currently open issues on Github, see for yourself whether you consider this stable software. Machine hanging indefinitely during poweroff/reboot is one of the classics.

  [1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues

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