I took a fairly quick look at the features provided by upstart and systemd for starting and managing daemons, since that's the part that I feel the most qualified to evaluate. I've been trying out different methods for doing that for about 15 years and run a bunch of production systems with a variety of different daemons, so I have strong opinions about what features I want.
The short version is that both upstart and systemd directly support most of the things that are annoying or repetitive to handle with init scripts. Both of them strike me as sufficient. systemd has some specific features that upstart appears not to have that I would immediately use in my day job if I had them available. I had difficulty finding equivalent documentation for OpenRC so that I could check its feature list against the things I've needed, but I see that Ian already asked about that, so I will read whatever documentation he's pointed to. Features both upstart and systemd have over sysvinit that I would immediately start using at work: * Process monitoring and automatic restarting * Setting process user and group * Setting process priority * Linux OOM killer score adjustment * Process limits (I would use file descriptors, primarily) * Multiple instances of a given service The last feature is extremely nice and would replace a lot of nasty and difficult-to-maintain code both at my day job (to run multiple copies of Apache, for example) and in Debian (consider the Tomcat init script). I think the upstart implementation of this is cleaner and easier to understand, and the systemd implementation is kind of weird, but it looks like the functionality is equivalent. Features that systemd provides that I didn't see in upstart (please correct me if I'm wrong): * StandardError=syslog. This would be *so nice* for *so many things*. Particularly for running Java applications, which are very bad about not sending everything to syslog even when one tries to write them to do so. I would start using this immediately. There are various external programs that can do this, but with sysvinit you have to set up the pipelines yourself and worry about the programs dying, whereas systemd takes care of all of that. * Lots of really interesting defense-in-depth security features. I particularly liked ReadWriteDirectories, ReadOnlyDirectories, InaccessibleDirectories, PrivateNetwork, and NoNewPrivileges, which provide a sort of lightweight process containment that would be much easier to use than a full-blown chroot, and in some ways more powerful. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
