http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140915064856

Contributed by [jj](http://www.inet6.se) on Fri Sep 12 07:06:45 2014 (GMT)
from the all your system is belong to us dept.

Ian Kremlin wrote in with this report on the GSoC he was involved in:


> This summer I, along with my mentors Landry Breuil and Antoine Jacoutot, worked on systemd shim-like replacements for four D-Bus daemons systemd provides, namely hostnamed, localed, timedated, and logind.


> Now let's clear some things up:

The purpose of this GSoC was (is) not to port systemd to *BSD in way, shape or form. Nor is it to replace the existing init(8), boot(8) or rc(8) programs. Systemd and *BSD differ fundamentally in terms of philosophy and development practices and special care was taken to only wrap the functionality of the aforementioned daemons and not create any new systemd-like functionality.

You can find the repository [here](https://uglyman.kremlin.cc/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=systembsd.git;a=summary)
.
Upon completion and review, my code will most likely end up as a port to be installed along with the GNOME suite, or any other ports that depend on systemd (upstream) and need a compatibility layer to work properly on non-systemd operating systems. It goes without saying that none of my code will end up (or belongs) in the base system.

Hostnamed (formally systemd-hostnamed) is a D-Bus daemon that handles setting system hostnames (in our case, that's through the sethostname(3) call and the /etc/myname file) as well as provides system information mostly found through uname(1). Hostnamed also handles determining the system's chassis type, whether it be a server, desktop, laptop, handheld, VM, etc. and providing a proper icon from that information.

Localed and timedated are more straightforward daemons that allow setting system/xorg locales/keymaps and times/dates/timezones/NTP settings respectively.

Logind (currently unfinished) is a rather large daemon that encompasses many aspects of a user's login session. This includes everything from getting current users and any PIDs under them, as well as system suspension and shutdown/reboot preparation. We are still researching a proper way to implement this as native systemd uses PAM for authentication, something we do not want to do on OpenBSD.

Overall, it was an excellent summer. I took this project because I was fed up with what systemd was doing to my then-main computer running Arch Linux. I figured this would be a great way to make the move to OpenBSD and I couldn't be happier. I dearly hope you'll be seeing more of me in the future ;)

As a fun aside, me and some friends all turned 21 around the beginning of August (the tail end of GSoC) and decided to pool our pennies together to take a road trip together to Colorado. This led to some [interesting circumstances](https://kremlin.cc/9workethic.jpg). All I can say is that there is stable LTE service between Texas and Colorado that work at speed in excess of eighty-eight miles per hour and that one can do a lot with a macbook charger, a working alternator, a bit of cabling and entry-level electrical engineering knowledge.



Thanks for the report, and hope you didn't get too tainted with systemd.