Wow, this sounds really familiar…
netsplitUpstart is a replacement for the init daemon, the process spawned by the kernel that is responsible for starting, supervising and stopping all other processes on the system.
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Why change it?
Running a fixed set of scripts, one after the other, in a particular order has served us reasonably well until now. However as Linux has got better and better at dealing with modern computing (arguably Linux’s removable device support is better than Windows’ now) this approach has begun to have problems.
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How does it differ from Solaris SMF?
SMF is another approach to replacing init developed by Sun for the Solaris operating system. Like initng it’s a dependency-based system, so see above for the differences between those systems and upstart.
SMF’s main focus is serive management; making sure that once services are running, they stay running, and allowing the system administrator to query and modify the states of jobs on the system.
Upstart provides the same set of functionality in this regard, services are respawned when they fail and system administrators can at any time query the state of running services and adjust the state to their liking.
Maybe SMF ought to be open-sourced? Oh, damn, it is already.
Maybe SMF ought to be ported to Linux? Oh, surely not, that’d be heresy. The Slashdot crowd would never wear it.
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