Much ado about init [LWN.net]

Much ado about init

Posted Nov 27, 2012 19:18 UTC (Tue) by mgb (guest, #3226)
Parent article: Langasek: Upstart in Debian

I'm guess I'm getting old.

I've Unixed thirty years from Version 7 to Debian Sid. I've found lots of bugs and I've fixed a few. And I've never ever had a problem with init. Never.

Never had a daemon escape by double forking. Never had a user complain that boot was too slow. Not even once. Compared to the downtime for Windows upgrades and reinstalls, Linux availability is a blessed miracle.

But then I saw all those people queuing round the block for the latest and silliest Windows 8.

And I realized they would have picked Debian instead if only I could have assured them that systemd ruled Stable.

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Much ado about init

Posted Nov 27, 2012 20:17 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Weird. I've got some 25 years of Unix experience, and I do remember lots of problems booting assorted machines, and starting up bog-standard services. Sure, nothing to blame directly on init (or sysvinit for Linux), but many, many times scratching head, reading cobbled together (probably written in the stone age and then "forward ported" innumerable times) scripts, trying to make sense of strange command arguments and pipelines. Suspecting that some code was there just because some experiment on a machine long turned to dust showed that that way it did miraculously work. No, definitely not fun. At least in Red Hat they did mostly rewrite the scripts from scratch, with some family resemblance among them. Before that, it was just hopeless.

Much ado about init

Posted Nov 28, 2012 5:03 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

/etc/init.d/bind9 restart on Debian stable still sometimes leaves me with the old bind still running. Does Windows do better? I don't know, I've never run a DNS server on Windows. All I know is that Linux *can* do better, and if you took all the time I've wasted working out why I'm still getting wrong lookups and put it together I could have enjoyed a decent quantity of the fine things in life instead.

Much ado about init

Posted Nov 28, 2012 6:45 UTC (Wed) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

I've never had such a problem restarting bind9. What was your bug number?

Of course bind9 restarts are relatively infrequent. One normally reloads.

Much ado about init

Posted Nov 28, 2012 6:56 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

> What was your bug number?

Unfiled. Does that mean it didn't happen to me?

Much ado about init

Posted Nov 28, 2012 11:45 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

It probably does mean, it was not relevant to you, at least not sufficiently relevant to file a bug ;~)

Well, I had a lot of problems with sysv-init, too (and never filed a bug about it).

Much ado about init

Posted Nov 28, 2012 14:47 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Hah. You're lucky.

I had once to go to our datacenter at about 3am to power-cycle a server because freaking bind9 hanged during the restart after the sshd was killed. There was due to a bug which manifested only if dnssec signing and validation was enabled (which still is not usual) so maintainers missed it.

Much ado about init

Posted Nov 28, 2012 23:35 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> I could have enjoyed a decent quantity of the fine things in life instead.

Can't get enough of EFI, heh?