BusyBox: Life Without Systemd (2018)

So... you can remove systemd and replace it with a few shell scripts? Isn't this, like, pretty well-known?

Or maybe I didn't get the point of this. It doesn't look to me like this is one of the regular rants against how systemd destroys everything. But I could be wrong about that?

One thing I found interesting recently while working with cloud instances (I usually work with traditional datacenters), is that those things boot extremely slowly.

The whole point of those new complex init systems was to boot faster. It definitely works for my desktop or laptop, but apparently not so much with the cloud.

If it's not gonna boot fast, I don't see the point of replacing straightforward shell scripts.

I use busybox with a minimal init process, _REALLY_ minimal, which is beyond enough for a desktop.

Minimal init is super stable in time, rock solid, code is close to zero, aka near 0 maintenance, doing a good enough job.

But, GNU with some of its minions is waging war on busybox: for instance the steam client is not distributing a static ELF64 of bash (and it could easily), but does distribute _mandatory_ bash and not sh scripts, and those scripts are carefull of using GNU command only niche options... but the main steam client binary seems about to kill those script abominations... hopefully... but that steam client binary is a ELF32 binary expecting x11/GL... oooh god... (it should be a super clean ELF64 binary: only glibc libs in NEEDED entries with a 2017-2019 manual ABI selection, dynamically loading system interface sharde libs, and without too brain damaged or recent ELF relocations (aka serious professional elf/linux binary crafting).

I use runit to manage various service groups for projects (e.g. last week, everything I was running at Bornhack camp). It simply does what it needs to do. It can be used in any context and doesn't need to take over the system. I recommend trying it out, especially if you think the complexity of systemd is needed.

I've seen quite a bit of systemd-free embedded distributions (like OpenWrt et al).

But I'd like to see more general-purpose embedded-focused distribution with systemd. The only ones I know about are the special-purpose LibreELEC/Jelos/Rocknix/Lakka variants.

It'd be nice to see such a distribution, but with proper package management. I was hoping https://distr1.org/ would become this, but it seems like it's been more or less abandoned.

Funny that the url is https://www.busybox.net/kill_it_with_fire.txt

Compiling mininal version of systemd init and systemctl is not that hard. Static with musl libc.

In 2024 it is not worth to deal with alternative init systems.