Linux

I never understood the hate, tbh. A lot of users don't even care if Sysd is used, as long as it works. So... Since the majority of distros use it... I think it works enough.

Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects, but run0 is an example of something that benefits from being a part of systemd. It ties directly into the existing service manager to spawn new processes.

It seems a fairly explicit goal of systemd to redefine Linux as a unified platform rather than as a kernel that can run any one of many implementations of many different services. I assume this is not just the systemd lead but also a goal of Red Hat.

Personally, while I am ok with systemd defining itself as a single source for all this functionality, I hate that they are taking away ( or making it hard at least ) to have independent implementations of these services.

What Chinera is doing with dinit and turnstile is really interesting. It would be nice to have feature comparable approaches to the systemd monolith that distributions could choose from.

It does make sense for me to have this functionality in systemd the way they want to go about doing this.

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, SystemD/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, SystemD plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning SystemD system made useful by the SystemD corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the SystemD system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of SystemD which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the SystemD system, developed by the SystemD Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the SystemD operating system: the whole system is basically SystemD with Linux added, or SystemD/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of SystemD/Linux!

So we'll have to say GNU/Linux/SystemD soon?

I'll just use an alias; sudo has been around for to long for me to change it and not be stressed about it.

sudo is a setuid binary, but it's a fairly simple program

Sudo is actually fairly huge and complex. Alternatives like really or doas or su are absolutely tiny by comparison.

Sure, sudo is a setuid binary, but it’s a fairly simple program, and at some point, you have to trust the code.

Have to trust the code ? doas for OpenBSD was created because of issues with sudo.

Talking with deraadt and millert, however, I wasn’t quite alone. There were some concerns that sudo was too big, running too much code in a privileged process. And there was also pressure to enable even more options, because the feature set shipped in base wasn’t big enough.

I've actually ran into some of those problems. If you run sudo su --login someuser, it's still part of your user's process group and session. With run0 that would actually give you a shell equivalent to as if you logged in locally, and manage user units, all the PAM modules.

systemd-run can do a lot of stuff, basically anything you can possibly do in a systemd unit, which is basically every property you can set on a process. Processor affinity, memory limits, cgroups, capabilities, NUMA node binding, namespaces, everything.

I'm not sure I would adopt run0 as my goto since if D-Bus is hosed you're really locked out and stuck. But it's got its uses, and it's just a symlink, it's basically free so its existence is kBs of bloat at most. There's always good ol su when you're really stuck.

I have 0 knowledge of these things, but I do know that people always comment that sudo is bloated, that nobody is truly using everything that sudo can do, only one basic command.

sudo is a setuid binary, but it’s a fairly simple program

Some people would disagree to this.

The brief description of run0 already has too many potential points of failure.

If the "listener" is PID1, which will run the privileged command, in theory, it would be quite bullet proof (in a working system PID1 is always there). But since this is systemd, PID1 is much more than that and much more complex. On the other hand spawning another daemon from PID1 to be the "listener" makes it, perhaps, even more complicated. You'd have to make sure the listener is always running and have some process supervisor there to watch if it exits... and maybe even a watchdog polling it to make sure it isn't frozen.

So my conclusion is the same as yours:

a solution in search of a problem

We already have a working solution. Have a well written SUID program. I've been using doas for some years now. It's simple enough that I trust it.

You can uninstall the sudo application and add sudo as an alias for run0 in your shell initialization script. That's better than them renaming run0 to sudo, because that will prevent people from running the real sudo if they want it.

You can create aliases

He's trying to turn Linux into Windows NT. And Microsoft hired him as a reward for doing so.

The vast majority of Linux users consider systemd as a good thing because it apparently makes system administration easier. They also don't agree that systemd is monolithic, because it's actually designed modular.

But of course there are detractors. The only thing I like about systemd is its declarative service definition and parallel service startup. But if I wanted to run an OS with bloated and inscrutable software (even with the source code), my choice wouldn't be Linux or Systemd.

I also routinely switch parts of my OS. This is harder with systemd. Although it is modular, the modules are so tightly coupled that it will prevent the replacement of modular components with alternatives. Frankly, I think systemd is killing the innovation in system component development.

it's just a link to systemd-run which is a part of systemd, i doubt it works separately.

but, if you use s6 as an alternative init system, s6-sudo is a somewhat equivalent aproach to how run0 works (instead of systemd-run it calls s6-ipcclient)

wtf