Debian switching to upstart

Posted Sep 7, 2009 1:39 UTC (Mon) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632) [Link]

What has been thoroughly discussed is that the current SysV init system is best suited for servers where you can assume quite a bit of things — Kind of hardware you can count on, general network topology, etc.

Of course, there are gross hacks, such as network-manager, but it makes no sense to wait (on the default installation, at least) for a user to be logged in to nm-applet ask network-manager to be so kind as to choose a profile.

What switching to upstart will provide is not about booting faster, but about booting smarter — And about behaving smarter. There is no use on having i.e. a server that binds to a specific network interface running if said interface is not available and configured, right? So that server should declare it depends on "eth0 gets a valid IP address", or on "getting 192.168.1.15". Then, when the kernel fires that event, upstart will tell the server to start.

Your Ethernet switch died? Well, that might push the network down. If so, the daemon in question should know it is now useless and shut itself down, so there are no unexpected, meaningless failure messages (of course, the admin should be notified about th problem — But about the fact that the problem happened in the network connection, not in the daemons' space. That will help him understand WTF. And of course, said daemons will come back to life once networking is restored.

The fact that upstart will allow for faster boots due to parallelizing all processes that wait for a specific event is just... A nice side effect.