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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 hendrikboom on Sunday November 23 2014, @08:02PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) on Sunday November 23 2014, @08:02PM (#119187) Homepage Journal

    As far as I know, you don't need systemd to have a parallel init. For some time not, the scripts in init.d have prerequisites listed at the start so that the init system can read them and act accordingly. Or wait a minute, did that start with systemd?

    In any case the information on what needs to be started before what is there, and you may as well use it and start independent things in parallel.,

    -- hendrik

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  • (Score: 1) by rleigh on Monday November 24 2014, @10:49AM

    by rleigh (4887) on Monday November 24 2014, @10:49AM (#119374) Homepage

    This is correct, we did have parallel boot with sysvinit for years before systemd. SuSE developed insserv and startpar which were later adopted by Debian and formalised in the LSB. insserv reads the dependency information from the init script headers and computes a dependency graph to start and stop scripts in parallel in the correct order (similar to make). At boot startpar can read the graph and start up services in parallel.

    This isn't quite as clever as systemd units, but it works well. And if you can to debug it, the graph is saved in /etc/init.d/.depend.* so you can read them, and insserv itself can do various diagnostics as well. When originally converting to dependency-based boot this was run on all init scripts distribution-wide to make sure a complete graph of everything was correct.

    Regards,
    Roger