Came to ask this too
Maybe the best way to manage operating system services might be something else than bunch of scripts envisioned in the 70s.
* https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare/wiki/Dropped-components
A need for a default-deny-all and then select what a process needs is the better security granularity.
This default-ALLOW-all is too problematic for today's (and future) security needs.
Cuts down on the compliance paperworks too.
Edit: Yes, I looked at the original "Rethinking PID 1" post and that seems to be the case[1]
I always thought InitWare would be good for that. See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/26850 --- we've been discussing this before NixBSD existed, even!
Debian can be configured at installation to go ''all in'' with systemd or ''go without'' if you prefer. The latter option pretty well mooted the purpose of the Devuan spinoff. In the Bullseye version it is possible to change a running system from using systemd to sysvinit or OpenRC.
I agree about seeing how Debian reacts to how InitWare develops from alpha.
I wish this project well. I hope it improves compatibility with BSDs for more projects.
I hope they are still actively developing this. last 5 commit dates which appear low for an alpha. Maybe we need to contribute to this or raise funding.
Date: Fri Aug 16 18:55:06 2024 +0100
Date: Mon Aug 12 22:33:49 2024 +0200
Date: Tue Feb 1 12:31:57 2022 +0000
Date: Tue Feb 1 12:31:42 2022 +0000
Date: Thu Dec 2 18:43:39 2021 +0000
That said, this sounds like what systemd should have been: a service control manager and nothing more, before they got a thirst for power and wanted to control any and every thing about the system.
But one of those already exists, it's called launchd, as long as you don't mind XML vs Windows INI syntax.
They started with a specific version of systemd and have been mutating it since then, so the whole this is "tainted" with LGPL now.
I think Systemd has a view that those things should reliably work together. I do not fancy a revival of the past where the user has to cobble a mesh of hopefully compatible libraries to achieve the same, taking weeks to study the Arch manual and resolving tons of gotcha's, all to be broken by next week's update.
The integration of all this stuff is now actively under test and maintenance with systemd.
And yes, the mentioned services also have an impact on the scope of service managing. Because if you have a unit that depends on a disk that needs to be unencrypted, this has to be resolved somehow in the right time.
I personally have had no need for systemd-resolved, but I think for *desktop* the list of droppable components is not large.
So maybe we should first have a conversation about the *desktop* vs *container-os* purpose?
> The controls are discretionary in the sense that a subject with a certain access permission is capable of passing that permission (perhaps indirectly) on to any other subject (unless restrained by mandatory access control).
Which permissions and authorizations can be delegated?
DAC is the out of the box SELinux configuration for most Linux distros; some processes are confined, but if the process executable does not have the necessary extended filesystem attribute labels the process runs unconfined; default allow all.
You can see which processes are confined with SELinux contexts with `ps -Z`.
MAC is default deny all;
MAC: Mandatory Access Control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_access_control
This well-trending HN story is a great boost, I'm sure. There is clearly an interest.
This has not been my experience across Debian and Arch
launchd, however works fine.
Even at the time, few games used an API where they managed multiple channels directly; Software mixing was commonplace from the 90s. Any game that wanted to play battle sounds was not relying on the mere 6-8 channels that cards from that time could handle.
Our modern Pipewire based workflow is remarkably simple and remarkably effective, and it's significantly an evolution of PA.
It fits the personality profile of not wanting to learn new things. After all, we didn't need it in 2002, so why do we need it now?
There is no fixing these people, so it doesn't make sense expending energy convincing them.
Arch OTOH was where these functions first worked out of the box.
I have no problem with secure boot as a concept but I don't know how to implement it so it can't be used to lock you out of your own computer. And an implementation which allows that is worse than no implementation.
(I won't spend my time detailing all my reasons for disliking systemd, but I have previously shared a small taste of them...)
The only boot security real users need is disk encryption.
The firmware refusing to let you change the keys is the root of the problem but it's also useful as an anti theft measure when it's not being abused by OEMs. Boot security doesn't depend on that though.
In addition to the above, as an alternative implementation I believe measured boot and a sealed secret is also sufficient to implement boot security without the need for the firmware to manage user provided keys at all.
I've never been entirely clear about the security model when the signed shim is permitted. I assume I'm missing some nuance.
Disk encryption alone won't protect you from either persistent malware (remote) or evil maids (local).
You seem to be wrong about cgroup v1; freezing works and is sufficient to reliably kill all children. Half-killed services was one of those really annoying problems back in the dark ages of sysvinit (not the most common problem, but perhaps the hardest to detect or deal with when it did come up).
So why does the presence of secure boot as a user-controlled feature affect that risk calculation?
First example coming to mind, TLS is broken in the version of OpenSMTPD that ships with Debian Stable.
Yes you read that correctly.
The version of OpenSMTPD in Debian Stable does not have functioning TLS. It's also not well documented why this is, things just don't work and you are forced to discover why.
It has to do with a broken dependency on their ancient version of OpenSSL. They refuse to patch it because muh stability - it requires a version jump. So you are forced to jump through hoops and install a newer version from backports if you expect TLS to work on your SMTP server.
Pick the parts you want in your BSD and clone it. Don't port.
How would they sign such a shim without my keys? I don't leave Microsoft keys enrolled on my laptop.
idk why Arch seems allergic to packaging shim-signed (it's an AUR, why would I trust such a key component to essentialy a stranger?), but here we are I guess.
These are also all components which would be extremely difficult to make portable - they require tight integration with the kernel and its boot process. I can't imagine how you'd implement them in a portable fashion, short of either making changes to the kernel on one or both operating systems, or implementing a complex set of shims to make them present similar interfaces. Either one of those options would be a sizable project on its own - I can't fault the developer from shying away.
Freezers were never used by systemd as part of its process tracking mechanism. And cgroup emptiness notification was unreliable under cgroups v1. So that's not wrong. It used some horrible mechanism where a binary is launched (!) when the cgroup becomes empty. And that can fail to happen under situations of low memory availability.
Related read is Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on cgroups:https://jdebp.uk/FGA/linux-control-groups-are-not-jobs.html
Because we always assume the BSDs rejected systemd but it might just be that they were put in a situation where they had no choice.
I literally teach people how to use launchctl every other week. I've found it's unituitive for learners because init systems tend to be unintuitive because there is a lot of hidden action and state going on. It wasn't until I started using it on my own I could develop some instinct for it. Personally, I don't find launchd anything but more ergonomic than systemd. A few man pages and some experimentation and you're at least crawling.
Not to say it couldn't be improved; I'd love to know why a failed bootstrap can't call plutil to at least lint the goddamn plist to notify of basic formatting issues instead of printing the same useless error for everything under the sun. "Error 5: Input/Output error" might as well just be an exit status of 5 for all the help it gives me.
* fork to periodically make a snapshot of server state, to avoid slowing down the main server
* spawn an external gzip to compress a log file
* spawn a handler for some file format
* spawn a daemon to actually handle some resource, which might be used by other processes too (this really should be a separate managed service, but in the anti-systemd world this is often not the case)
If everything is working fine, you'll only waste a bit of server RAM for a few seconds if you fail to kill the children alongside the parent. But the circumstances in which you want to restart the service are often not "everything is working fine".
As for ini vs xml, I've generally found xml is a crueller syntax for humans than ini. At the time I started using systemd, it was a bit funny - the last time I'd been editing ini files was on Windows 3.11. But I think ini and toml are now once again reasonably common so I forgot about how out of place it felt at the time.
Which becomes easy to bypass without boot security. If an adversary can modify code that executes in the boot process, they can steal your keys.
And I don't recall a lot of software working well when Pulse isn't available, so I don't know why people still bring it up. Perhaps it's because I wasn't there at the time, but I've only seen ALSA as "that audio system you use when you have nothing else available". I still need the PulseAudio-wrapper for Pipewire to be useful for my systems, so clearly the Linux world has moved to Pulse-first.
Together with Windows' Task Scheduler and PowerShell, you can configure Windows daemons quite well. They're limited by problems like "services can't take command line arguments", though, which is unfortunate.
1) It enables better separation of concerns, Twelve-Factor App style. For example, user-installed programs no longer need to connect to a logging daemon or execute a complex daemonization dance [1]. They can just run like a normal command-line program and dump logs to stderr.
2) It cuts down on integration problems, shell script glue, and the amount of different config syntaxes you have to know. Its architecture is modular with over 100 different binaries, so you can still pick-and-choose components and do privilege separation, but because these components are all coming from the same vendor, you know they're going to work well together.
3) It can do certain things far more reliably because it's willing to use Linux-specific APIs. For example, thanks to cgroups v2, it can supervise a process correctly no matter what kind of weird forking strategy the process is using.
Since this project is intended to be compatible across Unix-like systems, it won't be able to use Linux-specific APIs, so advantage 3 is gone. It looks like it dropped many components of systemd, so advantage 2 is partially gone too. Is this project just about getting some cross-cutting concerns into the init system and having better scheduling of service startup?
[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/daem...
> On NixOS, either the initrd "secrets" or the software that decrypts them is stored unencrypted on writable media. Ownerbooted sixos closes this loophole without any "trusted computing" voodoo, eliminating all unencrypted storage except for an eeprom whose hardware write-protect pin is connected to ground... coreboot [loads] an immutable pre-kexec kernel from write-protected SPI flash... authenticate the user, decrypt writeable storage, kexec into the post-exec kernel... The speaker runs ownerbooted sixos on his workstations, servers, twelve routers, stockpile of disposable laptops, and on his company's 24-server/768-core buildfarm.
This war of words between the BSD community and systemd, as far as I've been able to tell, dates back to when Poettering went to the GNOME mailing list to propose making GNOME depend on systemd. He made this request with the proviso that it shouldn't necessarily be a hard dependency, so that needn't have been a problem in itself, but then he made a remark in an interview with linuxfr.org:
> I don't think BSD is really too relevant anymore, and I think that this implied requirement for compatibility with those systems when somebody hacks software for the free desktop or ecosystem is a burden, and holds us back for little benefit.
and as you can imagine this was ill-received by the BSD community.
Could systemd, or at least a useful subset of it, have been made cross-platform from the get-go? It would've taken more work. I don't think the amount of work necessary would have been particularly onerous, which I hope InitWare shows. It would have required making certain compromises like systemd being happy optionally running as an auxiliary service manager rather than as the init system.
In the end, though, Poettering has his preference to target GNU/Linux only, and he is entitled to that.
> It fits the personality profile of not wanting to learn new things.
'systemd haters' learn a lot. They learn how to write manual boot scripts, set up mdev instead of udev, compile their own kernel, install their own u-boot or coreboot, strip binary blobs, etc. etc. They know MORE than the average systemd guy. They just don't want to learn systemd.
Isn't the whole purpose of systemd to ease and automate administration and configuration, so the user need not care? Doesn't that imply that systemd admins/users know LESS?
----
Now let me make my own characterization of 'systemd enthusiasts'.
These people are overworked sysadmins that hate manual configuration. They want it easy, everything automated, they want to not care about it, they want the distro to auto-do everything and not even ask, they want less admin work. Systemd does all these things for them and they are in heaven. They're so enthusiastic that they feel we should all be one big happy family under the systemd umbrella.
But they fail too see that no company or manager will tolerate people that are _not_ overworked.
When something becomes automated, people previously doing the manual job are fired. A 10 people non-systemd team that works day-and-night to set manually up boot, mounts, network, services, cron, backups, logs, etc., as soon as systemd automates the work, will be cut down to just one guy (or less) and he will still work day-and-night, same as before, doing the work of the entire team. And he won't be able to take break because there's nobody left to replace him.
They also fail to see that resilience comes from diversity. Uniformity, systems where software is identical, updates are identical, configuration is identical, permissions are identical, etc., will also fail identically and probably at the same time, and will be hacked identically and at the same time (by automated bots/tools).
Manufacturers don't need any user-facing standardized controls to implement lockouts. So the possibility of a feature being used as a lockout shouldn't be a justification for taking away the option of having a user-controlled security feature. Taking it away from users isn't going to stop manufacturers from doing it anyway with proprietary technologies instead.