One of my small claims to fame is that I was the first person to document how System V init scripts worked when they were created at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Now nearly 30 years later, System V init scripts, along with the traditional init process, are being replaced in RHEL 7 with the magnificent (and somewhat daunting) systemd service.

To help myself (and hopefully others) understand how systemd works to start up RHEL 7, and later manage the services and other units controlled by systemd, I wrote the following article:

Overview of systemd for RHEL 7

My main goals were to understand and explain how the new systemd boot process works, then provide examples of how tools (such as the systemctl command) are used to manage and query the different systemd components. I was hoping that this document could help spark some questions about systemd that we could discuss here.

Are there things you still don't understand about systemd? Do you have some of your own favorite features of systemd you would like to share? Please feel free to add your comments here.