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Gerrit Pape
Personal blog · smarden.orgsystemsprogramming
Gerrit Pape writes [smarden], a personal blog at smarden.org about systems and programming. Since 2010, 41 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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59mentions?
41HN people?
2010–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision24 people · 29 mentions · first linked 2010-05-08
- Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2024-09-09
- /runit/runit-init.8.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-01-21
- /runit/svlogd.8.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-27
- /runit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-02-28
What Hacker News says?
I'm about as anti-systemd as you can get, but I also cringe whenever I look at some of those massive, convoluted shell scripts in SysVinit. There is a middle path, with runit[1], which mostly uses short, simple shell scripts for its process initialization and supervision. Brevity and simplicity are really the keys when it comes to shell scripts. I really don't have a problem with them if they're short and don't try…
Comment linking /runit/
on “Mastering Bash and Terminal”Submitted Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision as a story · 110 points
HN discussionThe claimed reinvention from scratch of a text editor, and the nice command, are in fact nothing of the sort. One is a means for invoking a text editor (of one's choice) against particular configuration files, no more a "reinvention from scratch" of a text editor than the vipw command is; and the other is one of the several settings specifying eventual service process state, and is no more a reinvention from scratch…
Comment linking /runit/chpst.8.html
on “Python gets a new governance model”Submitted Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision as a story · 45 points
HN discussion> you're almost surely not using any kind of fsync's in your plain-text logger I am, though, and have been for many years. * http://untroubled.org/daemontools-encore/multilog.8.html * http://b0llix.net/perp/site.cgi?page=tinylog.8 * http://smarden.org/runit/svlogd.8.html * http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/cyclog.html
Comment linking /runit/svlogd.8.html
on “Appropriate Uses for SQLite”Submitted Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision as a story · 17 points
HN discussionThis isn't something that is inherent to Debian packaging. So it´s not an RPM/DEB thing at all. There was a proposal a couple of years back by one Debian member to do pretty much this, and buried somewhere on the Debian WWW sites there is an explanation by that person. Unfortunately, I mislaid the URL and have forgotten who it was. The essence, however, is to do as Gerrit Pape happens to have done all along with xyr…
Comment linking /pape/Debian/
on “Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?”Submitted runit: a Unix init scheme with service supervision as a story · 3 points
HN discussionConsidering the broad range of such softwares that already exist , written by people such as Felix von Leitner, Gerrit Pape, Laurent Bercot, and so on, why do you think that Linus Torvalds is the person to write one? Or needs to write one? * http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/ * http://skarnet.org/software/s6-linux-init/ * http://smarden.org/runit/runit-init.8.html * http://www.fefe.de/minit/ * https:…
Comment linking /runit/runit-init.8.html
on “Linus: “I no longer feel like I can trust ‘init’ to do the sane thing””Submitted Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAdding a browser component to applications would be a pretty big regression. You want details? 19 tabs. ublock origin, tab search. The browser process alone (no tabs included) is sitting at about 615 megabytes of RSS. The GPU process is using another 325 megabytes. Ublock origin is using 115 megabytes on top of that. The tabs are varying between 20 megabytes (for the runit documentation, http://smarden.org/runit/ ),…
Comment linking /runit/
on “Doing work locally minimizes problems with Electron apps”Which part of http://smarden.org/runit/ and its sub-pages do you wish to be better? And how?
Comment linking /runit/
on “Void Linux”If all you need is init (and not a process supervisor), docker comes with one called 'tini' built in. All you have to do is supply `--init` to the `docker run` command. Or use `init: true` in your docker-compose.yaml. As far as a different process supervisor, I'm not sure. I've used supervisord and agree it's kind of awkward. I have heard of these but don't know much about them: https://smarden.org/runit/ https://gi…
Comment linking /runit/
on “Nitro: A tiny but flexible init system and process supervisor”Alternatives have been implemented before: http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html http://smarden.org/runit/ The more you look at any of DJB's software, the more of the future you'll see.
Comment linking /runit/
on “How to Crash Systemd in One Command”I’ve never used it as an init replacement, but runit ( https://smarden.org/runit/runit.8 ) is great for supervising applications and services. - It’s built into BusyBox and is very lightweight - Configuration is dead simple (everything is basically shell scripts in the filesystem; no special config language) - Includes logging functionality with rotation - Easily controllable from other applications using named pipe…
Comment linking /runit/runit.8
on “Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux”Shell and bash are actually excellent at this, but people don't like writing shell scripts. This is just process chaining. Take a look at DJB's or the more modern runit for init toolkits that compose. https://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html http://smarden.org/runit/ Here is a bash function that retries N times: retry() { local n=$1 shift for i in $(seq $n); do "$@" done } retry 5 echo hi Then you can compose with a timeou…
Comment linking /runit/
on “Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd”You have the wrong metric. The metric should be the efficiency of the mechanism in implementing SSL . Now look at things like Gerrit Pape's sslio , http://smarden.org/ipsvd/sslio.8.html . Note that the subject at hand purportedly uses several of Gerrit Pape's other tools.
Comment linking /ipsvd/sslio.8.html
on “Stali: A new static Linux distribution”I am a bit surprised that they (seemingly? not clear in the article) went back to sysv init rather than exploring other options. I assume they just wanted to go back to something with which they were very familiar (and for which they probably already had scripts). But after going to void linux, I've found runit [1] to be an excellent init system. I was able to sit down and read the documentation in under an hour and…
Comment linking /runit/
on “Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd”> That tool’s RSS is somehow 170KB (vs zero for a self-daemonizing process). Why is the RSS relevant? I assume it doesn't need to keep on running. Also, even if it kept running, 170KB is not the end of the world. > Also, it’s incredibly complicated. (I looked at the source.) Here’s a writeup of a simple daemon: https://pavaka.github.io/simple-linux-daemon-tutorial/ Maybe it's complicated, but perhaps it's trying to…
Comment linking /runit/
on “AMD's Radeon 890M: Strix Point's Bigger iGPU”Here are how services are monitored on a few different projects: daemontools A series of scripts that run the supervise program. It initially runs svscanboot [1], which enables logging and uses svscan [2] to look through a service directory in order to execute the supervise executable for each service. [3] Supervise loads the run command, and unlike runit (which was inspired by daemontools) when run ends, it waits a…
Comment linking /runit/useinit.html
on “Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork”daemontools also has manpages, thanks to Garrit Pape, the author of runit ;) http://smarden.org/pape/djb/manpages/ The manpages are installed by default in every system I use -- debian, ubuntu, MacPorts, and FreeBSD ports.
Comment linking /pape/djb/manpages/
on “Daemon Showdown: Upstart vs. Runit vs. Systemd vs. Circus vs. God”Not so much about timeouts, but related in that it is based around managing children processes: The lineage of tools descending from daemontools for service management is worth exploring: daemontools: http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html runit: https://smarden.org/runit/ s6: https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ dinit: https://davmac.org/projects/dinit/
Comment linking /runit/
on “Way too many ways to wait on a child process with a timeout”That concept of "obsolete as a Debian package" does not really exist, so you are asserting something meaningless. And you brought up the timing of systemd yourself, only to then find that your point was wrong. You have a lot to learn about the rather sad history of runit and daemontools in Debian, as well as about the ways that Debian people decide what is packaged. This is only some of it. * https://tracker.debian.…
Comment linking /pape/
on “The importance of Devuan”It's possible, but it's not designed to. It was designed to run under init, as a daemontools clone. Explained further here: http://smarden.org/pape/djb/daemontools/noinit.html "In contrary to Richard Gooch, I suggest not to implement service dependencies and runlevel handling in the Unix process no 1, /sbin/init, keep it small and simple, that is why I wrote the runit package"
Comment linking /pape/djb/daemontools/noinit.html
on “Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't”runit seems to have been designed to be able to replace init: http://smarden.org/runit/replaceinit.html
Comment linking /runit/replaceinit.html
on “Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't”We've all done it. (-: For some while I read people saying that, despite the existence of Paul Jarc showing how svscan as process 1 would actually work and Gerrit Pape leading the way with runit-init and demonstrating the basic idea, one could not do full system management with daemontools and wholly eliminate van Smoorenberg init and rc. * https://code.dogmap.org/svscan-1/ * https://smarden.org/runit/ It was one of…
Comment linking /runit/
on “Inside OS/2 (1987)”Why not use http://smarden.org/runit/runit-init.8.html and run my_init from runit?
Comment linking /runit/runit-init.8.html
on “Docker and the PID 1 zombie reaping problem”Why not use already existing init? runit seems small enough: http://smarden.org/runit/ Or if you want small have a look here for minimal PID 1 "So how should init be done right?" http://ewontfix.com/14/
Comment linking /runit/
on “Docker and the PID 1 zombie reaping problem”Have you tried runit?[1] [1] - http://smarden.org/runit/
Comment linking /runit/
on “Count me as a systemd convert”I've heard good things about Runit + Monit together: https://gist.github.com/mguterl/279082 I'd like to see Runit [1] and S6 [2] get more attention. Docs and easy-to-apply tutorials would be a godsend in this area. I too really want to replace systemd on Arch. Currently, this is an uphill battle due to so many packages having systemd service files, and the fact that I've never replaced an init system before makes th…
Comment linking /runit/
on “Broken by design: systemd”
