Re:Systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer
by einpoklum on Saturday January 06, 2024 @10:45AM
(#38892338)
> Previous inits were glorified loop { fork() } programs.
Maybe (I'm not an expert on old init systems), but current inits aren't that.
> The issue to be solved is: how to determine parallelism in boot
I think you're replying to another comment of mine. At any rate, there were and are alternative solutions rising to meet this challenge - which involve nothing like the behemoth which is systemd. Examples: OpenRC, runit, GNU Shepherd (sort of).
There were many scripts, many implementations, but interestingly most were compatible with each other.
The largest issue inits had was that the flexibility they provided gave distro maintainers a lot of choice in how those scripts should operate to be consistent with the rest of the system.
Things like log locations.
The issue to be solved is: how to determine parallelism in boot, how to supervise a process with minimum complexity, and how do we do structured logging.
Interestingly: SMF solved all of these a decade before.