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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @05:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @05:43AM (#119042)

    "I am honestly mystified by your sentiment. How often do you reboot? Why?"

    - You are running a virtual server that, for whatever reason, gets Slashdotted all of a sudden. The hypervisor's monitoring program sees 100% capacity for a few moments and decides to clone the server on a cluster somewhere else, and then load balance the demand. Of course you want this new server to stand up as quickly as possible.

    - As part of your company's reciprocal goodwill, you are forced to run services in a shithole country to keep the locals gainfully employed. The infrastructure sucks, and brownouts are common. The power goes out, and your UPS gives you about 5 minutes of power because of the extremely high power drain. Two things happen: 1) Your server is being stood quickly up on another physical cluster elsewhere, and 2) when power is finally restored, local services need to be restored as fast as possible.

    Maybe not the best scenarios, but these are just off the top of my head.

    Desktop Linux has no money. RedHat figured that out years ago and became the first billion dollar open-source company. Linux has two $$$ generating applications: the enterprise (almost all of your Windows AD servers have been hosted virtually on a Linux cluster for the past half-decade or so), and Android. SystemD is being written to address the former, and parallel loading of services can ultimately save millions of dollars when shit hits the fan. Android, on the other hand, is busy re-learning the lessons from the Windows 3.1 days. As a desktop user, you are somewhere in the middle, but the fact that you have no money means that you don't get a say in its direction. If arguing over init scripts is really important to you, go to OpenBSD where you will actually be heard.