Excerpts from Daniel J Blueman's message of 2013-03-26 09:02:19 -0700: > On 26 March 2013 21:55, Chow Loong Jin <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 26/03/2013 18:38, Daniel J Blueman wrote: > >> When setting up Ubuntu servers and desktops, two daemons I always > >> remove are the atd and irqbalance. > >> > >> irqbalance is perhaps good when you have a server with quad-port NIC > >> with a high rate of small packets and have found it to benefit over > >> the kernel's interrupt allocation (but wastes time and energy > >> otherwise); finally, the demographic who know and use the at daemon > >> must be >1% surely. > >> > >> What justification do we have for continuing forcing these on users by > >> default? (and can we win back some a slightly leaner, securer setup by > >> revisiting this logic?) > > > > I'm not sure you win much back: > > - apt-cache show at | sed -n 's/^Size: //p' => 37376 > > - ps -C atd -o cputime,etime => 00:00:00 8-03:30:27 > > - ps -C atd -o rss => 68 > > > > So all in all, 37.4k of disk space, 68k of memory, and approximately 0 > > seconds > > of CPU time out of 8d 3h. > > > > Are there many security vulnerabilities in atd? > > The same can be said for irqbalance, except it does clock up cputime: > > $ ps -C irqbalance -o cputime,etime => 00:40:55 82-02:24:34 > ...which is 30s/day on a single-user workstation > > $ ps -C irqbalance -o rss => 392kb > > But this is all missing a core tenet of Debian/Ubuntu: you select what > you want running and aren't imposed upon. >
This is hardly imposing. We run a number of things for convenience, not because they are hard requirements. Ubuntu, even Ubuntu server, is still focused on being simple to use, not 100% technically pure. Part of that is including utilities that have a number of use cases. > DL> at has reverse dependency lsb-core, that is if we care to support > DL> lsb-core set out of the box. > > Out the box, lsb-base is installed; lsb-core isn't, so that doesn't > change anything (you'd still need to install lsb-core which would pull > in atd). > > If we have no solid technical reasoning for imposing these daemons by > default, I'll propose we don't. irqbalance is one of those things that makes things a ton better when it is needed, and is nearly free when it is not. -1 on removing it. atd is highly useful when you want it, and I have seen people re-implement it in perl/php/python/etc. without realizing that simply doing echo /run/my/thing | at now + 5 minutes Would solve their problem. That said, its got the worst command name *EVER* for googling. So I don't know that its uptake will increase much beyond now. Still.. as has been noted.. the footprint is not exactly massive. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
