Giving systemd a try on sparc

[lariano]

I want to share my impressions of using systemd on a new installation of gentoo/sparc. I used the experimental multilib profile and an up-to-date 3.18.12-kernel for my Sun-Blade-1500. For the first approach I followed the Gentoo Sparc Handbook and configured the traditional openrc boot process. As already mentioned in another post of this forum (https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-988668.html), the current silo version needs the compressed kernel image (zImage). The uncompressed image didn't boot on my machine (lost a lot of time with this issue ).

After booting with openrc I made the switch to systemd as described in the gentoo-systemd-wiki (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Systemd). It was not very difficult to get the machine running systemd. At the end two problems remained:

• journald creates corrupt log files in /var/log/journal
  
• polkitd segfaults and won't start
  

Both issues are reported elsewhere in forums and doesn't seem restricted to sparc architecture. For the journald problem there are workarounds. I simply deleted the directory /var/log/journal and relinquish persistent log files. I only have log entries since the last boot. It should be possible as well to forward log entries of journald to another logging framework (didn't try that however) having full persistent log files.

The policykit issue is related to a dependency on spidermonkey (libmozjs). I didn't find a workaround so far (upgrading/downgrading - no success):

[lariano]

Found a solution for the polkit problem. I had to downgrade polkit-0.112-r2 to polkit-0.112 thereby downgrading spidermonkey from 17.0.0-r3 to 1.8.5-r4. Now polkit starts fine.

Diabled journald logfiles completeley and forward log message to metalog framework by changing two parameters in /etc/systemd/journald.conf:

Storage=none
ForwardToSyslog=yes