Systemd's Final Form: The Filesystem
Description
A minimalist black-and-white comic strip, stylistically similar to xkcd, featuring two stick figures. One figure is standing while the other is sitting at a computer. The standing figure asks, 'WHAT ARE YOU DOING?'. The seated figure replies, 'I'M READING THE KERNEL CHANGELOG.' The standing figure then says confidently, 'I DON'T THINK THERE'S ANYTHING THERE THAT COULD SURPRISE ME ANYMORE.' In the next panel, the seated figure reveals, 'EXT5 WILL BE DIRECTLY INTEGRATED INTO SYSTEMD.' The standing figure's only response is a large, bold 'WHAT.' The comic satirizes the long-standing controversy in the Linux community regarding 'systemd,' an init system that has grown to encompass many services, which critics say violates the Unix philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well.' The joke is that integrating a filesystem (ext5) into systemd is an absurd and horrifying escalation of this trend, making it a perfectly surprising and shocking entry in a kernel changelog. A watermark '@SEBIWICB' is present at the bottom
Comments
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Systemd's next feature will be to replace the entire TCP/IP stack with a single binary called 'systemd-networkd-httpd-ftpd-sshd-connectd'. DNS resolution will be handled by 'journalctl -u systemd-dnsd'
EXT5 is being merged into systemd? Perfect - I’ve always wanted a filesystem that only mounts after passing health-checks from pid 1 and writes its superblock to journald
After 15 years of systemd absorbing everything from DNS to home directories, the only thing more surprising than ext5 being integrated into systemd would be systemd NOT trying to absorb it. At this rate, we'll need a separate init system just to boot systemd itself
The joke brilliantly captures the Linux community's existential dread about systemd's ever-expanding scope. For veterans who remember when init systems were simple PID 1 processes, the notion of systemd absorbing a filesystem - traditionally a kernel-space concern - represents the ultimate architectural boundary violation. It's the logical conclusion of 'systemd does everything' taken to its absurd extreme, resonating with anyone who's watched systemd grow from init replacement to encompassing logging, networking, DNS, time synchronization, and boot management. The punchline works because it's simultaneously impossible and somehow feels inevitable given systemd's trajectory - a perfect encapsulation of the 'do one thing well' philosophy's death by a thousand features
Systemd integrating EXT4? At this rate, it'll fsck your hardware interrupts next - kernel purity lost to PID 1 imperialism
Ext5 integrated into systemd? Perfect - now / is a unit with Requires=systemd and After=/, so the boot failure is a documented dependency loop instead of a kernel panic
At this rate, mount(2) will be deprecated in favor of “systemctl storage up.”