lubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[Walter Lapchynski <wxl@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Be forewarned: systemd is officially coming to Lubuntu on Vivid dailies Monday.

For those that don't know, systemd is an init system, which is to say
that it gets your operating system started. Ubuntu's been using
Upstart for quite some time now but with Debian (and tons of other
distros, including Arch, Red Hat, Fedora, Gentoo, (open)SUSE) having
switched to systemd, it's time that we make the change. This has been
coming for quite some time but it's set to be now official for just
about the entire Ubuntu family (Touch is the not-surprising exception,
but I'm sure it will be forthcoming).

That being said, please make sure that you guys start heavily testing
come Monday and make sure there are no surprises. The boss and others
have already done testing, but this was pretty much on the surface. If
you guys could dig a little bit deeper, that would be great. You can
double check that systemd is being used as init with `ps -p1`. Don't
be shocked if you have upstart processes running assuming that the
`--user` switch is being used, as using systemd for user sessions is
planned for a later date.

Beta 2 is set to ship on 26 March, so we don't have a ton of time to
deal with showstoppers if we have them. This is a FFe (Feature Freeze
exception), which is to say that normally we would not allow new
features in this late in the development cycle, so it's not a definite
thing if we catch problems early.

Please also keep an ear out for any users running Vivid that are
encountering any strange problems. This may be something we want to
quietly spread across various communication channels so that others
not on this list can be aware of it.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Martin Pitt <martin.pitt@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 8:56 AM
Subject: Announce: Vivid will switch to booting with systemd next
Monday, brace for impact
To: Ubuntu Development Announcements <ubuntu-devel-announce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


Hello all,

it should be no secret any more, but it'll get serious now: we will
1switch Ubuntu Vivid to boot with systemd instead of upstart. That is,
desktop, server, cloud/autopkgtests (that already happened two days
ago), and all flavors. snappy has used systemd from day one. We will
*not* switch Ubuntu Touch, however [1].

As per the feature freeze exception [2] this is scheduled to happen on
Monday. Technically, this will flip around the preferred dependency of
"init" to "systemd-sysv | upstart", which will affect new installs,
but not upgrades. Upgrades will be switched by adding "systemd-sysv"
to ubuntu-standard's dependencies.

So if you already want to do this change today, you can switch today
already if you want. If you never booted your system with systemd
before, it's advisable to do an one-time boot first. Please see

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers#Switching_init_systems

for details. This also explains how to move back to upstart for one
boot or permanently.

If you run into any trouble, please do file a bug (ubuntu-bug
systemd)! I'll do my best to keep up with them. Please have a look at
/usr/share/doc/systemd/README.Debian for some debugging tips.

Contingency plan: If after some weeks we find that there are too many
or too big regressions, we can revert to upstart by default with two
simple uploads (ubuntu-standard and init).

Thanks,

Martin

[1] This is blocked on most platforms currently running an ancient 3.4
kernel. Also, there's some porting work to do on the upstart jobs, but
that's low priority due to the former.

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1427654
--
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)

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@wxl | http://polka.bike
Lubuntu Release Manager, Head of QA
Ubuntu PPC Point of Contact
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