Ubuntu to adopt systemd and drop upstart

[ponder]

Well it's pointless pissing into the wind so it looks like Ubuntu is following Debian...

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316

Losing graciously
Friday, February 14th, 2014

With Bdale Garbee’s casting vote this week, the Debian technical committee finally settled the question of init for both Debian and Ubuntu in favour of systemd.

I’d like to thank the committee for their thoughtful debate under pressure in the fishbowl; it set a high bar for analysis and experience-driven decision making since most members of the committee clearly took time to familiarise themselves with both options. I know the many people who work on Upstart appreciated the high praise for its code quality, rigorous testing and clarity of purpose expressed even by members who voted against it; from my perspective, it has been a pleasure to support the efforts of people who want to create truly great free software, and do it properly. Upstart has served Ubuntu extremely well – it gave us a great competitive advantage at a time when things became very dynamic in the kernel, it’s been very stable (it is after all the init used in both Ubuntu and RHEL 6 and has set a high standard for Canonical-lead software quality of which I am proud.

Nevertheless, the decision is for systemd, and given that Ubuntu is quite centrally a member of the Debian family, that’s a decision we support. I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously. It will no doubt take time to achieve the stability and coverage that we enjoy today and in 14.04 LTS with Upstart, but I will ask the Ubuntu tech board (many of whom do not work for Canonical) to review the position and map out appropriate transition plans. We’ll certainly complete work to make the new logind work without systemd as pid 1. I expect they will want to bring systemd into Ubuntu as an option for developers as soon as it is reliably available in Debian, and as our default as soon as it offers a credible quality of service to match the existing init.

Technologies of choice evolve, and our platform evolves both to lead (today our focus is on the cloud and on mobile, and we are quite clearly leading GNU/Linux on both fronts) and to embrace change imposed elsewhere. Init is contentious because it is required for both developers and system administrators to understand its quirks and capabilities. No wonder this was a difficult debate, the consequences for hundreds of thousands of people are very high. From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well. I trust the new stewards of pid 1 will take that responsibility as seriously as the Upstart team has done, and be as pleasant to work with. And… onward.

 

[Tinuva]

Well this is great news actually, though probably not completely surprising, as they already have enough on their hands with MIR.

 

[ponder]

Well this is great news actually, though probably not completely surprising, as they already have enough on their hands with MIR.

I suspect the same will eventually happen with MIR. No one but Ubuntu is adopting it (not even even xubuntu, kubuntu, lubuntu) so they will have to carry this can all on their own while everybody will be jumping on the Wayland bandwagon. Wayland will have more momentum behind it and who do you think nvidia or ati(amd) are gonna support..?

 

[Rocket-Boy]

I quite enjoyed the way upstart worked but it makes sense to rather go with the bigger standard than to fight against it.

 

[Tinuva]

I suspect the same will eventually happen with MIR. No one but Ubuntu is adopting it (not even even xubuntu, kubuntu, lubuntu) so they will have to carry this can all on their own while everybody will be jumping on the Wayland bandwagon. Wayland will have more momentum behind it and who do you think nvidia or ati(amd) are gonna support..?

I am 50/50 on what I think they will do with this one. On the one side I am hoping they will dump MIR, as it really is not helping anyone, especially considering if you want to use it, they for the Ubuntu CLA down on you and you need to pay.

On the other hand, I suspect they will have freed up resources working on Upstart that can now help out with MIR. And the reason I think they won't just drop it, MIR can also already run Android binary GPU drivers, and MIR is after all mainly meant for mobile devices. As for Nvida/AMD drivers, it will probably also work via some sort of compatibility layer, it won't be perfect but it will probably be good enough for Unity/Ubuntu.

Only time will tell, however Ubuntu is doing some sort of a mobile announcement soon, so who knows what that will be about.

ps. There is at least already one mobile device out there running Wayland, so I don't see why Ubuntu can't use that either.