Upstart

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Upstart
Upstart logo
Developed by Scott James Remnant
Initial release 24 August 2006
Latest release 0.3.9 / 12 October 2007
OS GNU/Linux
Genre Init daemon
License GNU General Public License
Website upstart.ubuntu.com

In Unix computing, Upstart is an event-based replacement for the init daemon. It was written by Scott James Remnant, an employee of Canonical Ltd. Upstart operates asynchronously — as well as handling the starting of tasks and services during boot and stopping them during shutdown, it supervises them while the system is running.

Easy transition and perfect backwards compatibility with sysvinit were explicit design goals. As such, Upstart is able to run sysvinit scripts unmodified. In this way it differs from most other init replacements, which usually assume and require complete transition to run properly, and don't support a mixed environment of traditional and new startup method.[1]

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[edit] Adoption

Upstart was first included in Ubuntu in the 6.10 (Edgy Eft) release in late 2006, replacing sysvinit. While the new Upstart daemon is used, most of the services are managed using the old sysvinit scripts. The reason for this has been attributed to missing features that prevent the complete replacement of the existing scripts with native Upstart service descriptions.

As Upstart matures, it is intended that its role will expand to the duties currently handled by cron, anacron and atd, and possibly (but much less likely) inetd.

Upstart is also intended to replace sysvinit in the 0.7 release of Frugalware Linux and in Fedora 9[2]. In both cases it will function in the same manner as it does in Ubuntu, i.e. it will replace sysvinit, while retaining the existing scripts.

Upstart can also be installed on Debian from the experimental repository.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Discussion of design and implementation of Upstart
  2. ^ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Upstart - Features/Upstart - Fedora Project Wiki