Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 19, 2014 11:34 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: Of course this goes to a General Resolution by HelloWorld
Parent article: The Debian technical committee vote concludes

> Why is it PID 1 who needs to do that?

*Every* program which holds a file open on the root file system (or any file system, for that matter) needs to either exit, or exec() a program within the new (RAM disk) root. Otherwise you cannot unmount the root FS.

PID-1 may not exit. Therefore it's its job to exec the last step. PID-2 cannot do that. (OK, it could call the unmount-and-reboot program on the RAM disk after triggering PID-1 to exec a new init there, but again: what would be the point of that additional complexity?)