Report from systemd.conf 2015

[Michael Biebl]

Hi everybody!

Last week I was at the inaugural systemd.conf which took place in Berlin
from November 5th-7th [1]. The first two days were devoted to talks and
presentations, the third (and last) day for hacking and discussion.
You can find pictures [2] and videos [3] & slides [4] for the talks.
Lennart posted a summary as well on his blog [5].

A couple of DDs were present, like Simon McVittie, Marco d'Itri or
W. Martin Borgert. While there were quite a few talks about "containery"
stuff unsurprisingly, I think there was also a lot of interest in what
(classic) distros are doing with systemd and what problems they are facing.

On the second day, I gave a talk about systemd in Debian [6] which I
think was well received. I would like to use the opportunity here to
thank Martin Pitt, who helped prepare the talk.
I talked about the history of the systemd package in Debian, what
challenges we faced during the transition, the concerns and issues we
have today and what QA/CI we use nowadays. This sparked a lively
discussion afterwards.

Especially the CI stuff was interesting to a lot of people. E.g. I was
approached by Lennart, who wants to know more about the performance
stats as he'd like to see the autopkgtests integrated in the upstream
github workflow.
There were also the maintainers of OpenSUSE and RHEL, who also run
automated tests and were interested how autopkgtest works and if there
was a chance for collaboration. The RHEL guys use beakerlib [7] for
their tests. Beakerlib is open source, the tests themselves IIRC are not
freely available (yet). So I'm not sure yet how we can proceed from here
and if maybe some of our tests could be made available directly upstream
(in case they are distro-agnostic enough).

There was also quite a bit of interest in detecting performance
regressions. Something we currently don't do at all.
I'd like to mention David Strauss' interesting talk [8] here, where he
goes into details about what performance limits they hit with systemctl
daemon-reload.

If you are interested in QA, we, and especially Martin, would be
delighted to see you getting involved and improve our test-suite even
further.

Another topic I raised during the talk, was the constant growth of the
systemd project and how to keep the footprint down for minimal
installations by splitting up the package.
I suggested that distros might coordinate on that issue, and this
already resulted in a lively discussion on the upstream mailing list [9].

I was also approached from the nice people working on Cockpit [10],
which is a fancy, web-based UI to administer your server.
They are really interested in having Debian as one of their supported
distros. We were able to get cockpit up and running on Saturday, and
Dominik, one of the cockpit developers, already blogged about the
results [11].
During the week I started to toy around a bit with cockpit and turning
it into a proper package. The results are on Alioth [12], but they are
by no means finished and there is still quite of work to do.
I probably won't maintain cockpit in Debian, so it would be really
awesome if someone would pick that up, and maybe use my git repo as
starting point.
We lack a good UI for systemd, and cockpit really looks promising in
that regard.

Finally, I'd like to thank Lennart, who invited me to systemd.conf and
made it possible that I could come there.

That's all for now. If you have further questions or would like to work
on some of the topics above, please don't hesitate and get in touch with us.

Regards,
Michael



[1] https://systemd.events/
[2] https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cilbcdfrpbk12h2qe8o18fn7m04
[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvq_RgZp3kljp9X8Io9Z1DA
[4]
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-UWEwsUY5PJZXQ2emdsVXJ4OTA&usp=drive_web
[5] http://0pointer.net/blog/systemdconf-2015-summary.html
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F1mrT5qSWI
[7] https://fedorahosted.org/beakerlib/
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVk-NWtiIZY
[9]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-November/034917.html
[10] http://cockpit-project.org/
[11] http://dominik.perpeet.eu/cockpit-on-debian-8-2
[12] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/cockpit.git
-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?


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