Sharing this blog post because I liked reading it. Nice photos and images and shows lots of options. The section about Gentoo Linux suggests it is unclear whether Gentoo uses Systemd. From what I’ve seen after tinkering with a Gentoo container last week is that Systemd is an option for “make world” but not the default.
Just about every service manager has a similar concept. systemd makes it very visible (and maybe has a longer default timeout? I haven’t checked) but this is a generic problem.
Programs should be fine if you just send SIGKILL but it is often better if you let them shut down gracefully. For example maybe it wants to tell it’s clients that they should fail over to another host so that they won’t experience interruption, and maybe the database wants to flush it’s updates to disk so that it doesn’t need to waste time recovering from the WAL on next boot. But at the end of the day it isn’t systemd’s fault. It is just enacting the configuration. If you think that 90s is too long you can change it.
That’s good to know.
I’m just saying that for a hobby admin like me, other init systems don’t seem to have this behaviour or configuration requirement. And I find it strange that it always goes “isn’t systemds fault”… it’s clearly doing something different here than other inits by default. And that is what is criticised.
I seem to remember this problem on Arch before systemd. But maybe I am misremembering. I also fail to imagine a way to avoid this issue, but maybe other systems are doing something clever that I didn’t think of.
I’m saying this as a casual hobby admin:
Systemd saying “it’s not my fault” and “so you think you’re better than me?” pretty much sums up my user experience with it.
To me, this just isn’t very inspiring. Each to their own I guess.
Only because something is the default, it does not have to be a good idea.