[arch-general] RFC: OpenRC as init system for Arch

[XeCycle]

Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists at yahoo.co.uk> writes:

> On Mon, 07 May 2012 22:40:01 +0800
> XeCycle wrote:
>
>> Violations of this philosophy can be easily found.  The Linux
>> kernel is such one.  It is already big, with many misfeatures, or
>> "anitfeature"s; but we all use it, right?  Linus said such a
>> design simplifies the intercommunication between kernel modules.
>
> I disagree, your obviously clutching at straws, OpenBSD, no modules but
> monolithic yes. Many argue for and against monolithic or kernels such
> as QNX where drivers can't hang the kernel (atleast in theory). This is
> irrelevent. Simple tools do become more than they're parts. grep, cut,
> tr, cat and do they're particular job well and with less bugs.

You're right, but --- you still need something complex to do with
complex jobs, so I'd say there's nothing wrong with these complex
tools --- right?

In the traditional pipe way of using these Unix tools, each are
acting quite like a finite automata, and you join them
sequentially to perform the job.  But a finite automata is not
Turing-complete, you'll need to do a lot more when you need
something missing in this paradigm.  So we see many sys admins go
with Perl.

> Init is a simple job.

Depends on what you want out of it.  You can surely hand off
parts of the job to something else, say, user session management;
but if that job needs to talk to init to do better, why not just
integrate it with init.

> The main case you didn't bring up is perhaps where speed is paramount.
> I can't think of any others of the top of my head and certainly none
> that apply to whether the ultimate dependency, init, should be complex.
>
>
> Imagine a system where the kernel had been stripped down to kilobytes
> yet init was megabytes.

That would be a waste of brain cells.  If several MiBs is surely
needed to make the system usable, it's okay to call them together
as "kernel".

> p.s. I wouldn't mind knowing more about event driven too. I believe I
> was given an impression of what it was when systemd first hit ubuntu but
> I can't remember finding out exactly. A quick google just now turned up
> nothing.

IIRC Ubuntu goes with Upstart the first time I heard of them.

-- 
Carl Lei (XeCycle)
Department of Physics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
OpenPGP public key: 7795E591
Fingerprint: 1FB6 7F1F D45D F681 C845 27F7 8D71 8EC4 7795 E591
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