Systemd Test Day on Tuesday 2010/09/07

It's test day time again, folks, and this one's a biggie! You may have read about the brand new initialization system, systemd, written by Lennart Poettering. At the moment, we're planning to use it as the default initialization system for Fedora 14. Obviously, this is a bold step with a fairly new piece of code.

This week's Test Day, which will take place on Tuesday 2010/09/07 rather than the more usual Thursday, is on systemd, so it's a very important one! It will also serve at least two functions: as usual, the testing will help us to improve the code so that if it does go into the final Fedora 14 release it will work as well as possible, but the Fedora steering committee will also be using the results of the Test Day to help inform their final decision as to whether to go ahead with systemd for the Beta and final release, or whether to revert to upstart. So there's a lot riding on this Test Day. As usual, the Test Day will run in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC - see this page if you're not sure how to use IRC.

As usual, we've tried to make it as easy as possible to participate. There's full testing instructions on the Test Day wiki page, and you can contribute some helpful testing just by running a nightly live image and making sure it boots correctly. Of course, the more testing you can contribute the better, and there are lots of tests documented on the page for those who have the time and the ability to install a copy of Fedora 14 for testing. We also welcome freeform testing of systemd during the Test Day - it will be very helpful for people simply to configure a test Fedora 14 installation with the configuration you'd typically use, and make sure systemd handles starting the system properly.

Lennart and myself will be around as much as we can during the Test Day to help out and follow up on your results. We're both in European time zones at present. Lennart's IRC nick is 'mezcalero', and I'm adamw. Please do come along and help us test out this important new component - it's really important that we get as much testing done as possible. Thanks!