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Suggestions for Init System Features?

posted by LaminatorX on Sunday November 23 2014, @01:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the first-do-no-harm dept.

Subsentient writes:

I am the maintainer of the Epoch Init System, a single threaded Linux init system with non-intrusiveness in mind, and I'm preparing to release 2.0. It's mostly a code cleanup release, but while I'm at it, I thought I'd ask the Soylent community what features they'd like to see. I'm open to all good ideas, but I'm wary of feature creep, so as a result, I won't consider the following:

* multithreaded/parallel services, because that goes against design goals of simplicity and harms customizability
* mounting support or networking support; it's an init system, use busybox if you need a mount command.

So what do soylentils want to see in the next release of the Epoch Init System?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday November 23 2014, @03:16AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday November 23 2014, @03:16AM (#119016) Journal

    Then you are paying the price of two processes and IPC between them instead of one doing it the traditional way. Though it may have benefits, but they seem unclear at the moment.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday November 23 2014, @03:35AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 23 2014, @03:35AM (#119022) Journal
    I've seen this proposal before. The justification is that the dirt-simple process that runs as PID 1 doesn't have anything in it to fail. And the PID 2 process can be restarted without incident. This means, so I've been told, that you can upgrade the init program without rebooting the machine, which apparently is a problem with systemd.

    • (Score: 3) by Subsentient on Sunday November 23 2014, @04:46AM

      by Subsentient (1111) on Sunday November 23 2014, @04:46AM (#119036) Homepage Journal

      You can still do that. Epoch uses IPC to transfer its process state information to the updated copy. 'epoch reexec' is all that's needed to upgrade all the way from 1.0 to the current master. And it's a *full* update.

      --
      "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday November 23 2014, @02:16PM

        by sjames (2882) on Sunday November 23 2014, @02:16PM (#119103) Journal

        Surely the state should be serialized to disk in case the new instance crashes.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:59AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:59AM (#119074) Journal

    Given that the only thing that PID1 in that proposal does, other than starting PID2, is to re-parent orphans, I don't see a lot of IPC taking place. From my understanding the main problem is that PID1 is handled specially by the Linux kernel, and thus any problem with PID1 will cause the system as a whole to fail. Which means that you would want to put as little as possible there.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.