As Arch has now begun the transition away from sysvinit/initscripts in favor of systemd (see https://www.archlinux.org/news/end-of-i ... s-support/), how should those of us who might like to migrate to systemd go about doing so?

It is easy enough to set everything up except actually calling the systemd binary on boot, as we don't have control over the bootloader and can't just change a line in grub to init=/bin/systemd.

As sysvinit receives less and less support, it will become more and more important for Linode to provide/document a way to change over to systemd.

Thanks!

-Aaron

Nevermind, just found how to do it:

1. Make appropriate /etc/rc.conf changes, as per https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd.
2. Remove initscripts

pacman -R initscripts

3. Install systemd-sysvcompat

pacman -S systemd-sysvcompat

(This will probably prompt you about conflicting with sysvinit and ask if you want to remove sysvinit, say [Y]es.)

Big thanks for this!

I was nervous about swapping over to systemd on the linode. Turns out this really is all I needed to do. Once the linode rebooted I used the lish console to re-start sshd, and from there I could log in and get all my systemd services setup.

As an FYI to others, once systemd is installed you can start enabling services even if it's not actually running as the init system. That way when you reboot you won't have to log in via lish and start things manually.