"BSD-style" init scripts, [LWN.net]

"BSD-style" init scripts,

Posted Jun 28, 2004 17:47 UTC (Mon) by donio (subscriber, #94)
Parent article: A look at Slackware 10.0

The funny thing is that (most of?) the BSDs don't use the old single-rc
setup anymore. I believe NetBSD started the trend, they switched to a
fairly nice REQUIRE/PROVIDE dependency based rc system in 1.5 and
apparently FreeBSD has adopted that system too. I am not sure about
OpenBSD.

Does Slackware still use a single rc file?

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"BSD-style" init scripts,

Posted Jun 28, 2004 18:14 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

>Does Slackware still use a single rc file?

No, there is a directory (/etc/rc.d) which contains a collection of rc scripts. This list is from my desktop machine:

rc.0@
rc.4*
rc.6*
rc.K*
rc.M*
rc.S*
rc.acpid*
rc.alsa*
rc.atalk
rc.bind
rc.cups*
rc.dnsmasq
rc.gpm-sample*
rc.hotplug*
rc.httpd*
rc.inet1*
rc.inet1.conf
rc.inet2*
rc.inetd*
rc.ip_forward
rc.local*
rc.lprng
rc.modules*
rc.mysqld*
rc.nfsd*
rc.portmap*
rc.samba
rc.sendmail
rc.serial*
rc.sshd*
rc.syslog*
rc.sysvinit*
rc.udev*

The rc.S script runs at startup, then rc.M runs when the system goes multiuser. rc.6 runs at restart, and rc.0 runs at shutdown. rc.4 runs when going into [xgk]dm mode. rc.K runs when going into single-user mode. All the various daemon-specific rc files are run by one or more of the preceding files at the appropriate times, or they can be run independently as, for example, '/etc/rc.d/rc.httpd start', etc.

It's a very nice, clean system if you ask me.

"BSD-style" init scripts,

Posted Jun 28, 2004 19:10 UTC (Mon) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

It's a very nice, clean system if you ask me.

In fact, doesn't sound that different from the SysV style. :)

"BSD-style" init scripts,

Posted Jun 28, 2004 19:27 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

I can't comment on the difference with the SysV style, as I've not had enough experience with it, but I *can* say that the Slackware scripts are (to me) a lot more readable than say, RedHat scripts. The reason I say that is because there are no utility functions to trace through, no extra stuff at all. Each script is straightforward shell script. Anyway, I like it. :-)

"BSD-style" init scripts,

Posted Jul 1, 2004 4:46 UTC (Thu) by set (guest, #4788) [Link]

Well, it does appear to use a sysV init daemon, but then so does
gentoo, without being traditional sysV init systems. eg. it doesnt
have a series of directories, like /etc/rc0.d /etc/rc3.d filled with
symlinks to the scripts in /etc/init.d with names like K05foo and
S90bar, indicating the order of a set of scripts to be run when
leaving and entering a new runlevel. Rather, it uses a bunch of
/etc/*.conf files to determine the behaviour of the helper scripts,
and a large script for each runlevel that calls the helper
subsystem scripts. Which is similar to the old BSD system, but
their scripts and conf files were all just in /etc/, and there is
not really an idea of general runlevels, but more like security levels.

"BSD-style" init scripts,

Posted Jul 1, 2004 12:14 UTC (Thu) by Dom2 (guest, #458) [Link]

There's a good paper by the author of NetBSD's rc.d system. It shows why the design choices were made and why he thinks it's better than the SYSV style startup scripts.

-Dom