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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Well, yeah. PA used ALSA APIs that most applications didn't, which exposed bugs in little-used, little-tested driver code. Nothing implausible about that.
The standard AC97 and USB audio drivers worked fine—I know they did because that's what I was using with PA at the time—but the drivers for more esoteric audio hardware had yet to be debugged, and Lennart couldn't feasibly test and fix all of them by himself because he didn't have the hardware. Others in the community did, and together they fixed the bugs and eventually got PA working smoothly on everything.
Of course. PA was specifically designed to be network transparent, same as the X11 protocol it was typically used with.
Ah, but he was correct. He did, in fact, know best. Lennart Poettering brought an end to the clusterf*** that was Linux audio pre-PA. No one else solved the problem until he came along and said “no more,” and I must say I'm appalled at the ingratitude of his detractors.
Nonsense! Before systemd, startup took forever, shutdown took forever, and it was a crapshoot whether shutdown would succeed or hang. Systemd hasn't fully solved this problem, but it's a lot better than what I had to live with in the bad old days.
Also, systemd brings with it a logging system with integrity checking, structured data, and database-like querying. Huge improvement over BSD syslog.
Also also, systemd has proper process supervision, services can depend on devices, unit/global start/stop timeouts, networkd, user session tracking and cleanup, user services, easy-to-use sandboxing, and on and on and on. There's all kinds of useful goodies in there.
Nobody else solved the problems ? Other then hotplugging audio, init thing have been solved many times over. Wanna know the alsa bug on my audio card ? It calls master volume "master center" instead of master. Good progress on pa has been made after its creator long left. And it's done properly only now with pw. PW... where the dev asked for advice from professionals instead of knowing it all. PA is now x11, without the pedigree.
And what about making udev locked down to one init ? I should be greatful for that ? SystemD didn't make computers boot faster the, say, upstart. Logging does not have to be tied to it, as there are even established protocols for it. Etc etc etc
I should be greatful.. for the one true way
Nope. Before PA, we had ESD, aRts, and NAS. All of them had horrible latency. They could play a ding at approximately the right time, but everything else was utterly beyond them. They were also mutually incompatible and there was no reliable way for apps to discover which one, if any, they were supposed to use.
And multiplexing multiple audio streams to a single input/output device with reasonable latency, and moving an audio stream to a different device, and individually controlling audio streams' volume, and sending audio streams over the network or Bluetooth with reasonable latency, and…
Yeah, no. Linux audio sucked before PA came along. I know it did because I was there, struggling with it.
Okay? I didn't claim that PA never had any bugs of its own. All software has bugs.
I also didn't claim PA is perfect, nor that some newer, better system will never come along. I claimed that PA is vastly better than what came before it, which is correct, and I have the experience to prove it.
Red Hat chose to cease maintenance of the separate udev and focus its efforts on the systemd-integrated udev. Others took up the task of maintaining a separate udev, and called their fork eudev. I'm not seeing any problem with this.
Upstart expects daemons to
SIGSTOP
themselves to signal readiness. That is not a sound design.I don't know if there's anything else wrong with it, as I have never used it myself, but I have yet to hear any well-reasoned explanation of how it's better than systemd.
It isn't. You can still use a syslog daemon with systemd if you want.
Yes, and have you ever tried to implement them? I have. They suck.
/dev/log
. There isn't even a specification saying/dev/log
exists at all.And that's just the log record submission protocol. The storage format has all of the above problems except the one about
/dev/log
, and several more:This may have been acceptable in the 1980s, but it doesn't hold a candle to the systemd journal. Good riddance.
You should be grateful for software that is vastly better than its predecessors with no significant drawbacks, yes.