Re: BSD Init

["Brandon Joseph Adams" <bja@illinois.dyndns.org>]

> On Monday July 19, 2004 9:27 a.m. "Drews, Jonathan*" <DrewsJ@cder.fda.gov>
> wrote:
>>> BSD-style init is an unmaintainable mess.  It's not simpler by *any*
>>> stretch of the imagination.  It's actually *ridiculously* complicated
>>> compared to SysV init, which simply uses a bunch of symbolic links
>>> to determine what gets started/stopped at any given runlevel.
>>
>>  I don't think it is that bad really.  After all Apple uses FreeBSD as
>> the
>> basis for their computers now in the form of OS X. So there must be some
>> merit to them. If you think *BSD init is hard wait to till you get
>> clobbered
>> by Kudzu and ZeroConf. Have fun :).
>>  As for the compiling from source argument, Netcraft shows that FreeBSD
>> runs
>> on 2.5 million sites on 5 million hostnames.
>> http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/nearly_25_million_active_sites_
>> running_freebsd.html
>> Compare that with 1,465,000 sites that run RedHat:
>> http://news.netcraft.com/
>>  So source compiles can't be that big an impediment. BTW it's possible
>> to
>> package fetch on the *BSD's.
>>
>> BTW way great tutorials here on the NetBSD rc.d system.
>> http://www.mewburn.net/luke/bibliography.html
>
> I didn't see the original post, so I'm not sure what act/scene we're in.
> As one who was first introduced to UNIX in 1982, the Berkeley versions
> were all there were back then. When AT&T introduced System V and their new
> multilevel init structure, most of us looked at it with horror. Why all
> the complexity? Why do we need to replace one script with a hundred (or
> more)?
>
> In time we learned that with complexity comes flexibility and power. With
> its SysV Init, Linux gives me the power to alter the behavior of one
> function's start or stop script without putting the entire system's Init
> in jeopardy. With its well-ordered runlevel schema, I can add / drop /
> re-order / modify start & stop scripts with ease _and_ surgical precision.
>
Slackware, as I've said, will respect runlevels in a sysv directory
structure. This is implemented, afaik, for compatibility with commercial
software, but one can easily take advangtage of this.

> If I had to go back to a Berkeley style Init system (which I "assume" is
> still employed in *BSD), I'd go stark raving mad. To me it would be as
>
Nope. The NetBSD guys (lukem@, I believe) implemented an rc.d system
called rcNG a couple years back. It is very similiar to the way Gentoo's
init functions, with a simple structure, and files that have dependencies,
provides, etc. FreeBSD 5 uses this rcNG, and I think some of the 4.x
releases use it too, but I'm not sure to what extent. I'm not sure what
OpenBSD uses, but they're crazy anyway (in a good way normally). Dragonfly
uses whatever the latest 4.x uses I believe.

Brandon Joseph Adams
bja@illinois.dyndns.org


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