Another Init System: Sinit - The Suckless Init System

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 7 February 2014 at 12:48 AM EST. 28 Comments
OPERATING SYSTEMS
While in-fighting continues within the Debian camp over what should be the default init system in Debian, a developer has shown off his own tiny "sinit" init system project.

The "Suckless Init System" is a real init system and is derived from M. Farkas-Dyck's Strake init code. This "suckless" init system is designed to be a simple system and was made to scratch the itch of a developer wanting to remove BusyBox from his toy Linux distribution, Morpheus.

This init system is indeed very simple: "sinit exposes a set of operations via a FIFO. Normally this FIFO resides at '/var/run/sinit.fifo'. There are two commands currently supported, 'reboot' and 'poweroff'."

The Suckless Init System was shared with Debian developers but obviously isn't a serious contender in Debian's init system battle, but it's mentioned in case anyone is after a small Linux distribution project to checkout (Morpheus) or are looking for a very simple init system in comparison to systemd or Upstart. Sinit has been pushed to this Git repository under the MIT/X Consortium License.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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