Re: [gentoo-soc] [report 6.25-7.4] Daemons in Gentoo Prefix with OpenRC (extended to improving to OpenRC)

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 3:05 AM,  <heroxbd@gmail.com> wrote:
> Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org> writes:
>>> What we've discussed in the beginning, such as event-driven init,
>>> periodical events, process monitoring and crash restart are still on
>>> the todo list.
>>
>> That's great, do you feel confident you'll be able to get all of this
>> done?
>
> I feel these are not technically difficult. But the policies count,
> besides the debates that if we really need these fancy features for an
> init system. My current feeling (or planning) is that just to make dirty
> ones with simple scripts to see if our community (debian is more similar
> to us than fedora) really like the things. The rule of thumb is to
> always make them optional, hopefully independent, components.
>

As a certified member of the peanut gallery I can testify that process
monitoring and restarting would be a very nice feature to have.
Having this sort of capability in a chroot/prefix would probably
create a bunch of possibilities.  Tools for doing this exist, but they
are weak.

I switched a VM over to systemd because it had an unstable daemon and
I wanted to try out this feature.  Since systemd places each daemon in
a cgroup it is able to fairly effectively monitor what is going on
with them.  That might be something to keep in mind if you move ahead
with this.

I don't use a laptop with Gentoo so event-driven init is less useful
personally, but I imagine that if I had one it would be very nice to
have.  Again, I'd look at what upstart/systemd are doing to avoid
re-inventing the wheel here.

Keep in mind that process restarting is actually a very standard
feature in init - we just rarely actually run daemons directly from
init.  On the occasion that I've actually stuck something in inittab
init is very diligent in propping it back up.  The challenge will be
things like hung processes that don't actually die - but we can start
with the simple case.

Rich