Arch Linux have official announced that they are dropping support for sysvinit and embracing systemd. I don't particularly enjoy making fundamental changes to my server OS but I guess I better make the switch early. I like using systemd on my desktop but there's no benefit to my Linode (since I have only every restarted it a few times in years and it boots quickly already).

I have installed systemd and used systemctl enable for the services I need. How can I tell Linode to use init=/bin/systemd? Any pitfalls I should look out for?

You can symlink /sbin/init to /bin/systemd with this command run as root on your Linode:

ln -sv /bin/systemd /sbin/init

This command will fail if /sbin/init already exists, so if you still have sysvinit installed, you'll want to either stash its init somewhere, or uninstall it. As always, before making major changes to your Linode that could potentially break everything, make a backup of important data

Rather than bustin up your init yourself, you may want to use this:

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/ ... ysvcompat/

sysvcompat <3

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me | voltaireMC

To be clear, Arch has not announced any plans regarding dropping sysvinit. The currently announced plans are to transition so that systemd is a first class citizen on Arch, and make adjustments as needed to do that.

We'll likely see sysvinit deprecated in future for new installations and then potentially replaced for existing systems, but that's not official at this time.

- Les