Ubuntu 15.04 is switching to systemd

Ubuntu systemd 15.04 installation

Ubuntu 15.04 will be the first release of the 2015 and it is scheduled to be released in April. One of the most bumping changes is the switch from Upstart to systemd (yes it is written without capital letter.)

What is systemd?

systemd is a system management daemon. TLDR it is the program that supervises the system, it is made up of many daemons and it controls other daemons. It was primarily developed by Red Hat to replace the old SysV init. systemd provides many improvements namely: better design, better performance (thanks to aggressive parallelization), better dependencies, better logging and much more.

Ubuntu will be adopting systemd

So why did Canonical decide to adopt systemd replacing its own Upstart? That’s a good question, the answer might be complicated, but it has been a common decision: to get deeper in the discussion you can Google it, but Mark Shuttlewort himself wrote a good post on the decision explaining his point of view. As he says

it is after all the init used in both Ubuntu and RHEL 6

but systemd is really becoming a defacto standard in the field. Many Linux distributions have already decided to switch, namely Fedora 18+, RHEL 7, Debian 8. Also resulting in a fork of the last one: Devuan.

What will change for me?

If you are just a user, nothing will be changing on the surface, but much in the underground. Things are a lot different if you are a system administrator. To the ones used to systemd it may seem like they’ve used it since forever, but to everyone else the switch may be traumatic. Example of commonly used (taken from Ubuntu Wiki):

Operation

Upstart Command

Systemd equivalent

Notes

Start service

start $job

systemctl start $unit

Stop service

stop $job

systemctl stop $unit

Restart service

restart $job

systemctl restart $unit

Image courtesy of Maicon Fonseca Zanco.

Image courtesy of mark | marksei
mark

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