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by Karellen 894 days ago
> my concerns boil down to the fact that the adoption it has seen has lead indirectly (or, directly) into a monoculture;

Were there multiple implementations of sysv-init being used by different distros on Linux before systemd came along?
1 comments
dijit 894 days ago
yes, at least 5.

sysvinit, s6, openrc, runit and Solaris SMF

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Karellen 894 days ago
Were they alternate implementations of sysv-init? Or did they do their own thing, and also happen to run sysv-init scripts for back-compat? Because systemd also runs sysv-init scripts for back-compat.

Edit: Also, were any distros actually shipping those as supported init systems? I was under the impression that most of them were still in the "experimental" stage and not viable replacements (yet).

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liveoneggs 894 days ago
OpenRC and Solaris SMF definitely did their own thing. SystemV-init and the "run levels" concept was flawed from the very start when it replaced the previous BSD-style "single user" vs "multi user" boot up.

Linux only adopted SystemV style init because it was the norm in Solaris at the time. It is not a linux-ism.

As this article notes - systemd is actually fine as an init system and hardly anyone denies it. It's all of the other stuff (journald, resolved, timers, etc) + tight coupling + environmental assumptions that is the problem.

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awilfox 894 days ago
I'm unaware of any Linux distribution using SMF. If there was, I would have been running it. I didn't really like pfexec (it felt bolted on and not quite there yet), and I really really hated ZFS (and still do), but SMF made Solaris administration a joy.

I don't think any distribution was using runit before systemd, but it was available in Gentoo as a sysvinit replacement and ISTR it was used in the Rails community for supervising Unicorn.

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