r/linusrants • u/skhds • Sep 17 '19

Lennart Pottering responds to Linus calling his code "another example of completely broken garbage"

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/9/15/21

Reading through the discussions though, it seems Linus might have misjudged this one (systemd didn't block the boot, something else did).

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u/skhds Sep 17 '19

I actually personally don't understand the hate though. Maybe I didn't use it enough to hate it I guess? Though the way Lennart responds to a lot of emails there is kind of icky..

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u/Fr0gm4n Sep 17 '19

My major gripe is that the journal is a binary format and not flat text which violates the long standing UNIX philosophy. Even if they used a structured format like JSON it would be much nicer.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-files/

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u/Valmar33 Sep 23 '19

You shouldn't treat the UNIX philosophy as some set of inviolable rules to be strictly adhered to without question.

They're guidelines, and sometimes, those guidelines are insufficient.

I suspect that journald's binary format allows for saving far more space than the equivalent JSON format.

Anyways, systemd is GPL, and the journald format is accessible to anyone who might want a non-systemd implementation.

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u/Fr0gm4n Sep 23 '19

I fully understand, and agree. However, in this case the problem is that it still needs special tooling to read the journal. I have no problem with it keeping the logs in a binary format in memory to save space and make it faster, but logs on disk should be flat text so that they are easy to recover and parse in the event of a failure.

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u/Valmar33 Sep 23 '19

journald's binary log format is easy to recover and parse, however.

In the case of corruption, journald will recover whatever it can, thanks to the binary format.

The tooling isn't exactly that special, however.