Designing a new init: low level communication

Rene Mayrhofer rene.mayrhofer at gibraltar.at
Tue Aug 30 09:37:49 UTC 2005


Am Tuesday 30 August 2005 06:48 schrieb martin f krafft:
> What does the daemon read from init in monitor mode?
>
> init receives stdout,stderr anyway. Plugins can subscribe to those
> streams, per daemon or as a whole. Then a plugin would handle simple
> status output to the console, another could handle LSB output,
> a third could handle a splashscreen.
Yes.

> I quite like the idea of using FDs for this.
Seconded :) I would also like to keep a new init as simple as possible, and 
FDs seem to be the best (simple) way to deal with read-only filesystems. They 
can be used from compiled binares, with shell scripts and for just about any 
form of communcation you would need. After all, FD pipes are a part of the 
UNIX success story.

Just for the record, I do not mind changing any semantics in the init scripts, 
configuration file formats, etc. As long as the new system is technically 
superior and is easy to understand and use for users (i.e. administrators 
that just want things to be started or stopped), we can change pretty much 
everything. The current init system is that old that I really think we need 
something new from scratch to bring it up to current expectations.

Is it now time to take a step backwards from the implementation details and 
commit to a list of (technical, maybe also organizational) requirements that 
the new system should fulfill? Maybe a wiki page that serves as a living 
document of the aims and their status of support?

best regards,
Rene
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