starting Fedora Server SIG

Jeremy Katz katzj at redhat.com
Fri Nov 14 22:28:39 UTC 2008


On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 17:23 -0500, Seth Vidal wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 17:10 -0500, Seth Vidal wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Also, there's this weird "running daemons are bad" mentality which I'm
> >>> not really sure what the right way to approach is.  But it's one that
> >>> I'm not sure how true it is in our current world of increasingly moving
> >>> functionality out of the kernel and into userspace in which case you
> >>> have to have something running in addition to the kernel.
> >>>
> >>> Maybe to try some examples -- irqbalance is a daemon and not in the
> >>> kernel anymore[1], does that make it "not useful"?  Or for another side,
> >>> various kernel threads are really just daemons... maybe we shouldn't run
> >>> them either?
> >>>
> >>
> >> if you replace useful with necessary in his argument I think it ends up
> >> making more sense.
> >>
> >> If the daemon is not NECESSARY for the task it is fulfilling then why have
> >> it running?
> >
> > So I guess it boils down to how you define "task" then...
> 
> Actually it boils down to what the task is.
> 
> If the task is:
[snip]
> Then everything else is unnecessary to have running.
> 
> If the task is to deal with complicated dhcp and wireless configurations, 
> multiple and complicated vpn configurations and notify the 
> console/desktop user about all of these things (which a lot of laptops 
> fall into that category) then NM is extremely useful and I'd argue 
> necessary for a convenient computing experience.

But there's a cost to maintaining two systems that are entirely
divergent and with little sharing/modularity.  I don't see the value of
"don't run a daemon" as outweighing the cost of "keep another system
maintained".  

Jeremy




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