GNOME and/or systemd

GNOME and/or systemd

Posted Nov 4, 2012 12:27 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: GNOME and/or systemd by Cyberax
Parent article: GNOME and/or systemd

Well, in this case the sysvinit PID1 is !@#*&^!*& unreliable. It can't even kill processes robustly. It can't start them robustly as well - I've had more than one hangup during startup.

You seem to misunderstand what I want of PID 1. Its job is to run an rc script when (in effect) the system starts up and shuts down and to reap processes. *Nothing else* (even forking gettys is really something else's job). Killing processes is killall's job. Monitoring processes is something else's job. Starting processes without hanging up is the job of some scripty thing or something. It is very definitely *not* the job of PID 1, since that is complexity that *can* be somewhere else, and thus *should* be somewhere else, rather than in the one process in the system whose death causes an instant kernel panic.

You keep on giving complaints about sysvinit that have nothing to do with PID 1 robustness, which is my primary concern when choosing an init implementation. sysvinit never fails to reap zombies: it never fails to run its single rc script per runlevel change (those scripts might later hang, but that is not PID 1's fault). It never, ever dies.

I would be happy with systemd were its PID 1 incredibly simple and never changing and all the work done by something else (which can change as often as it likes without causing instant kernel panics if it goes wrong). But instead its PID 1 is more of a kitchen sink than I'd like. Even sysvinit PID 1 really does too much: I'm definitely going to have a look at s6 and see if it has moved things like process supervision to some other binary. PID 1 should not do this job.

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