Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Lennart Poettering decided to refute a few systemd myths on his blog, where “a few” means “30”. “There’s certainly some truth in that. systemd’s sources do not contain a single line of code originating from original UNIX. However, we drive inspiration from UNIX, and thus there’s a ton of UNIX in systemd. For example, the UNIX idea of ‘everything is a file’ finds reflection in that in systemd all services are exposed at runtime in a kernel file system, the cgroupfs. Then, one of the original features of UNIX was multi-seat support, based on built-in terminal support. Text terminals are hardly the state of the art how you interface with your computer these days however. With systemd we brought native multi-seat support back, but this time with full support for today’s hardware, covering graphics, mice, audio, webcams and more, and all that fully automatic, hotplug-capable and without configuration.“