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by throwabob214 4135 days ago
> FreeBSD has been in the early stages of working on a launchd port for 10 years now.

There were several half-serious individual efforts, but I don't think the community / foundation were pursuing it seriously until quite recently. Kip Macy has been working hard to get it in as an init replacement recently.

> It seems like progress with openlaunchd is going well, but there are certain things related to Mach IPC that need to be ported to the upstream FreeBSD kernel to get it working.

The mach stuff has been ported (recently), again by Kip Macy.

> I do recall some old version of launchd entitled launchd_xml was ported to pfSense, but it's one that puts the XML parser into PID1, so it's not desirable.

Right. I think the current plan is that the parsing is done in another process and then IPC'd to launchd via Mach. Or the plist stuff could be replaced with a 'libucl' parser that is safer in init? I'm fuzzy on these particular detail, sorry.

> IMHO, I wouldn't count on any major init changes in FreeBSD any time soon. It's been protracted enough already, and Jordan Hubbard giving a pep talk doesn't mean all that much. I could very well be mistaken.

It's going to happen soon. :-)

1 comments

>> FreeBSD has been in the early stages of working on a launchd port for 10 years now.

> There were several half-serious individual efforts, but I don't think the community / foundation were pursuing it seriously until quite recently. Kip Macy has been working hard to get it in as an init replacement recently.

This is because iXsystems (Jordan Hubbard) hired Kip to implement it for FreeNAS (and, presumably PC-BSD), not because the FreeBSD community thinks it needs a new init system.

Jordan also has plans to bring other large pieces from Apple to FreeBSD.

> This is because iXsystems (Jordan Hubbard) hired Kip to implement it for FreeNAS (and, presumably PC-BSD),

I believe EMC Isilon has also sponsored the work.

> not because the FreeBSD community thinks it needs a new init system.

Right. Kip is working on it because someone hired him too. But practically, this is how large-scale efforts get done. Some FreeBSD-using corporation hires / builds out a larger project in a way that is acceptable to the community and it is incorporated into base.

I do think the community has come to more or less that consensus at this point, though. The camp that is fine with /etc/rc hasn't started raising loud complaints about the idea incorporating a backwards-compatible launchd to replace rc.

And even now launchd is a more restrained projects than systemd.