New Group Calls For Boycotting Systemd

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2014 at 10:26:44AM +0200, Reindl Harald wrote:
> so *what* is your problem by a unit knowing "i must not run now"

What open-vm-tools needs is a system feature known as the "VMware
backdoor".  This is provided by other hypervisors too (notably qemu).

If you look at Hyper-V, it provides Xen features, and so a program
testing for "am I running on Xen" would not run on Hyper-V, whereas it
could run.

When we wrote 'virt-what', we put very large warnings in the manual
page about how you should test for features you need, NOT for a
specific hypervisor.

There are two exceptions to the above rule:

 - Product licensing, eg. the program must or must not run on certain
   hypervisors just because.  In other words, a management decision
   where engineering have to suck it up and implement it.

 - To provide additional logging / debugging information.

But in general terms, any program using systemd-detect-virt /
ConditionVirtualization which doesn't fit into the above two
exceptions is doing it wrong.

In other words, the feature invites you to write buggy software.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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