Status update on systemd for openSUSE Factory

Hi all,

here is a update on the work done on systemd for Factory :

(beware, post is long !)

• basic support for systemctl in chkconfig and insserv is done : it is pending review by maintainer before integration
• support for --root in systemctl was merged upstream and will be used by chkconfig/insserv patches above.
• a patch has been submitted to upstream systemd to parse insserv.conf : this patch only handles the "system facility" part of insserv.conf and automatically adds depencies specified in the file
• quick investigation on Yast2 to adapt runlevel editor for systemctl support : we really need help from other people, as I don't have any knowledge of Yast internal and it seems the yast dbus client part might be missing some parts, needed for runlevel editor to talk with systemd.
• no work done on /usr as separate partition : it is not a systemd issue in itself but from other programs which might be using data from /usr before /usr is available. The best solution would be to mount /usr from initrd => help needed !!
• (open)SUSE is using unofficial LSB target named $ALL which is supposed to put services requiring it at the end of the boot sequence (or at the beginning of shutdown sequence); After discussing with upstream : on a static boot system (sysvinit), it is easy to resolve such dependencies, but it isn't on a dynamic system (systemd). There is a ugly hack to handle that (creating a ALL.target file which is starting after default.target is done) but it would be probably better to just fix the 4 initscripts which are still using $ALL ( amazon-late, stoppreload, Susefirewall2_setup and vboxes). I'll open bug for them.
• X-Interactive support in systemd is not working properly : it will only work before getty is started and is broken if you try to start a service after boot. We need to transition packages which are still using X-Interactive to systemd-ask-password (which takes care of the async conversation). Only two packages need to be ported :
• apache2, when querying password for SSL certificate : apache allows to start a script to handle the password request. We only need to plug the script and configuration part in our package
  and get it used when booting with systemd.
• openvpn : this one is a bit complex because we can either write a daemon which would do the interface between systemd and openvpn management interface or we can try to patch openvpn to have a similar feature as apache and get this patch upstreamed. The latter has the preference of systemd upstream.
• For both packages, help is welcome.
• For compability with sysvinit, support for from /etc/insserv.conf in systemd was not added, so we could remove X-Interactive from openvpn/httpd sysvinit scripts but still have the function when booting from /sbin/init, thanks to /etc/insserv.conf list.
• /etc/init.d/kbd was not handled properly : this should be fixed inFactory today or tomorrow, with systemd taking care of setting up keyboard properly. However, we might need to improve /etc/sysconfig/keyboard parsing in systemd. More tests are needed (and of course, help is welcome).
• discussion in progress on opensuse-packaging mailing list and upstream on a set of cross distribution RPM macros to handle systemd unit files.

As you can see, we still have some work to do, but we need everybody help : either on the issues I mentioned (feel free to say "I want to help on this" here) or to do more tests or even to start creating .service files (but we still need to fix the issues listed above).

Thanks everybody for your attention.

I would be great if we could get the ball moving and maybe get one of
the next Factory milestone be a "systemd" test release but to reach this
point, we need YOU !