Upstart
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Upstart | |
---|---|
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
- initng — another asynchronous replacement for init
- launchd — introduced into Mac OS X in v10.4 to replace init and other system startup scripts as well as crond
- Service Management Facility, a complete full replacement/redesign of init from the ground up in Solaris starting with Solaris 10
- eINIT, a full replacement of init designed to start processes asynchronously, but with the potential of doing it without shell-scripts
- svscan from daemontools used as process 1
- BootScripts in GoboLinux
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ Discussion of design and implementation of Upstart
- ^ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Upstart - Features/Upstart - Fedora Project Wiki