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Out of confused mind.) There is no fundamental problem that it "solves" which other UNIXes presumably still does have. The problem does not exist. AIX, Solaris

Out of confused mind.) There is no fundamental problem that it "solves" which other UNIXes presumably still does have. The problem does not exist. AIX, Solaris, *BSD and many old-school Linux guys will tell you that. Also, any old-school guy will tell you that a kitchen-sink, put-it-all-in design is a wrong way. btw, user processes supervision is a task of an OS kernel, which it handles via a bunch of specialized syscalls, not of some "man-in-the-middle" user-level daemons. There is actually nothing to talk about, except some ambitions and bad designs.

icebraining 12y ago
btw, user processes supervision is a task of an OS kernel, which it handles via a bunch of specialized syscalls, not of some "man-in-the-middle" user-level daemons. I'm pretty sure /sbin/init runs in userspace even on *BSDs and Solaris, and does process supervision.
- dschiptsov 12y ago
  You would be surprised how a few processes it supervises. getties (remember these?) what else? initscripts has nothing to do with /sbin/init, surprise?
_delirium 12y ago
Solaris guys certainly wouldn't tell you that, unless they haven't used Solaris in the last decade. Since Solaris 10 (2005), it has a unified process supervision and init system, with declarative config files, dependency boot, and all that other good stuff that's just now coming to Linux. It's part of the Service Management Facility (SMF), which replaced the old init-script-based system. The Illumos distributions all use SMF as well, not BSD or SysV-style init/rc scripts. A few design decisions are now seen as warts (today, XML probably wouldn't have been chosen for the config files), but I think SMF is pretty widely seen as an improvement vs. managing services with shell scripts.
- dschiptsov 12y ago
  Please tell us about these improvements over shell init scripts. Let's say a have a program to run - nginx - very popular program. Tell us, please, what improvements the good stuff gives me? BTW, in my opinion, the SMF has been written "because we can" (use XML for configs and Java for its processing) not because shell init scripts has been broken. There are many strange reasons why some programs were written or has been adopted.
cwyers 12y ago
"Also, any old-school guy will tell you that a kitchen-sink, put-it-all-in design is a wrong way." That's pretty close to a no true Scotsman fallacy, isn't it?

icebraining 12y ago

btw, user processes supervision is a task of an OS kernel, which it handles via a bunch of specialized syscalls, not of some "man-in-the-middle" user-level daemons. I'm pretty sure /sbin/init runs in userspace even on *BSDs and Solaris, and does process supervision.

dschiptsov 12y ago
You would be surprised how a few processes it supervises. getties (remember these?) what else? initscripts has nothing to do with /sbin/init, surprise?

_delirium 12y ago

Solaris guys certainly wouldn't tell you that, unless they haven't used Solaris in the last decade. Since Solaris 10 (2005), it has a unified process supervision and init system, with declarative config files, dependency boot, and all that other good stuff that's just now coming to Linux. It's part of the Service Management Facility (SMF), which replaced the old init-script-based system. The Illumos distributions all use SMF as well, not BSD or SysV-style init/rc scripts. A few design decisions are now seen as warts (today, XML probably wouldn't have been chosen for the config files), but I think SMF is pretty widely seen as an improvement vs. managing services with shell scripts.

dschiptsov 12y ago
Please tell us about these improvements over shell init scripts. Let's say a have a program to run - nginx - very popular program. Tell us, please, what improvements the good stuff gives me? BTW, in my opinion, the SMF has been written "because we can" (use XML for configs and Java for its processing) not because shell init scripts has been broken. There are many strange reasons why some programs were written or has been adopted.

cwyers 12y ago

"Also, any old-school guy will tell you that a kitchen-sink, put-it-all-in design is a wrong way." That's pretty close to a no true Scotsman fallacy, isn't it?