Replacing the Aging Init Procedure on Linux

SmellsLikeTeenGarlic writes "Seth Nickell (of Storage and Gnome HIG fame) has started a new project which aims to replace the aging Init system on Linux. OSNews has more details on the project, directly from Seth. The new Python-based approach will make booting faster and it will talk to the D-BUS daemon, freedesktop.org's leading project. And speaking of freedesktop.org, it is important to mention the release of HAL 0.1, an implementation of a hardware abstraction layer for KDE, XFce and Gnome, based on a proposal by freedesktop.org's founder Havoc Pennington and being implemented by David Zeuthen. It is innovative projects like Storage, SystemServices and HAL that can bring the kind of integration to the underlying system that current X11 desktop environments lack."

Comments

Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like python a lot, but why make it a requirement for init ? Just means more stuff has to be installed fort he default system to work. I prefer to sue the base shell.

Re:Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when everything in /sbin was staticly linked, /bin -> /usr/bin and /usr was a separate filesystem?

No more.

The only thing we need still is parallel loading. Methinks a good RC system can do it.

RTFA

[truthsearch]

SystemServices is not at all tied to Gnome. It will probably not require much more than the kernel and Python. His goal is partly to make a nice set of APIs callable from a desktop like Gnome to ease with management and error reporting. This project is not tightly integrated with Gnome just because someone from Gnome has started it.

Re:RTFA

[tigga]

/bin/sh is not interpreted ? You don't consider it bloated ? Look better at Python, it's actually very elegant.

Python may be elegant as many other interpreters, but Linux supposed to be more or less Unix-compliant and if you already have /bin/sh there then just use it. There is no justification to complicate things.

Re:Keep this away from my server!

[elmegil]

As far as "most" sysadmins not understanding run levels, he's out of his mind. Maybe he doesn't get it, but it's a long standing thing that works well. In fact, it works SO well, that Linux adopted it from System V after using the older monolithic rc scripts for a long while.

D-BUS, and NIH

[avdi]

So I skimmed through the D-BUS spec and, as I expected, they are simply reinventing CORBA.

When will Open Source developers figure out that just because the OS community didn't come up with a technology, doesn't mean it has to be re-written with fewer features?

I gaurantee that whatever aspects of CORBA the D-BUS developers found unnacceptable - complexity, overhead - will be reintroduced into D-BUS by the time it reaches maturity. That's just how these things go - someone decides that Standard X is "cool, but too complicated", and then five years later they realize that their solution has become just as complicated as Standard X because, lo and behold, all that complexity was there for a reason. Real-world solutions never stay simple, because real-world problems aren't simple.

Transparency should be goal #1

[GeoGreg]

If someone comes up with a whizbang new boot system. great. Just make sure that if something goes wrong, or something needs to be changed, it's:

1. Easy to determine where the problem is.
2. Easy to fix using minimal tools available in single-user mode (i.e., vi).

I don't want some horrific equivalent of the Windows Registry lurking in the background. There should be no mysteries about what gets started and when. I'm not a Windows guru, so maybe this stuff is easy to determine in XP or Server 2003, but I've always found plain ol' text files to be much easier to deal with than fancy-dancy databases. Or at least compile the databases from plain ol' text files.

Wow .. did someone actually read the paper ?

[BESTouff]

As always on /. there are loads of uninformed comments just based on the title :)

I think Seth's idea is a good one. Of course, there are some things to refine: the dependency shouldn't be external (e.g. SystemService knowing the dependancy tree) but dynamic (e.g. GDM sees that its config requires network login, so it asks SystemService to start network), etc.

But overall rethinking the init is a good thing. Even just opening the debate is a very good thing. The mess of shell scripts is more a giant hack than a well-thought bootstrap system.

Re:Doh.

[pmz]

Unices are being deployed across more and more diverse kinds of systems, and dependencies on python and d-bus, both of which projects I support in themselves, are not going to be welcome in the init of the majority of unix systems today, especially in servers or embedded systems.

This still won't stop the GNU folks from fucking it up, though, because more dependencies ensure GPL-lock-in (you didn't think it could happen to us, too, did you?). This isn't a troll, but a very serious issue, where lots of software is becoming very GNU-specific rather than UNIX-specific (I hope everyone can see this distinction).