[Bernhard R. Link] > Currently we have a system where every user has a chance to debug > and fix those problems and make their system work again.
I just wanted to give a small comment on this, as one of the sysvinit package maintainers in Debian. The quoted text give the impression that the current init.d based boot system is working fine, and that is not quite how I see it. The current sysvinit boot system is not working properly on Linux. And it has broken in new and interesting ways the last few years, thanks to the fact that the linux kernel developers have removed the big kernel lock, causing the kernel to become more event based and less sequential during boot. These problems lead to boot failures when some kind of hardware is used (think disks and network cards, but it can happen with any hardware), because it is not possible for the current dependency based boot system to know when some hardware device is available during boot. A well known case is having the user home directory on an external USB disk, only to discover that the disk device node isn't available when file systems are mounted during boot. There are other examples. To solve this problem the early boot (note only the early boot _need_ this) need to become event based, and once the file systems, network interfaces etc are set up, the later boot can work using simple init.d script dependencies. I do not know the proper solution to this for Debian, but both upstart and systemd seem to provide a working solution with different costs and advantages. Personally I hope kFreeBSD and Hurd will get the required features used by upstart and systemd, to at least make it possible to use these systems on all the architectures handled by Debian. Or perhaps we should just teach sysvinit to handle kernel events and thus make it capable of solving the problem of the event based kernel internally. No-one so far have volunteered to look at this approach, and I have no plans to do so myself, but I am sure it would be possible to integrate the nice features of upstart and systemd into sysvinit. :) -- Happy hacking Petter Reinholdtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/2flvcmwo0pt....@login1.uio.no
