runit

This article is about a piece of software. For Runit Island, part of the Marshall Islands, see Enewetak Atoll.
runit
Original author(s) Gerrit Pape
Initial release February 10, 2004[1]
Stable release 2.1.2 / August 10, 2014[2]
Development status Active
Written in C, Shell
Operating system Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris
Type Init daemon
License New BSD License

runit is an init scheme for Unix-like operating systems that initializes, supervises, and ends processes throughout the operating system. Runit is a "reimplementation" of the "seminal" daemontools[3] process supervision toolkit that runs on the Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, and Solaris operating systems. Runit features parallelization of the start up of system services, which can speed up the boot time of the operating system.[4]

Runit is an init daemon, so it is the direct or indirect ancestor of all other processes. It is the first process started during booting, and continues running until the system is shut down.

The RubyWorks stack of software required to run Ruby on Rails incorporated Runit into its suite.[5]

Design

Runit focuses on being a small, modular, and portable codebase. Runit is split into three stages: one time initialization, process supervision, and halting or rebooting. While the first and third stages must be adapted to the specific operating system they are running on, the second stage is portable across all POSIX compliant operating systems.[6]

Usage

Runit can be used either as a drop-in replacement[7] for sysvinit, or as a service supervisor with sysvinit as the parent PID1 process ran from inittab.[8]

References

  1. ↑ Pape, Gerrit (2004-02-10). "runit-1.0.0 release". gmane.comp.sysutils.supervision.general (Mailing list). Retrieved 2013-12-10.
  2. ↑ Pape, Gerrit (2009-10-04). "runit - installation". smarden.org. Retrieved 2014-08-10.
  3. ↑ Purcell, Steve (2007-11-11). "Init Scripts Considered Harmful". sanityinc.com. Retrieved 12 December 2013.
  4. ↑ Pape, Gerrit. "runit - benefits". Retrieved 23 April 2013.
  5. ↑ "Process management with runit". rubyworks.rubyforge.org. Retrieved 14 April 2014.
  6. ↑ Pape, Gerrit. "runit - benefits". Retrieved 23 April 2013.
  7. ↑ Pape, Gerrit. "replacing init". Retrieved 11 August 2014.
  8. ↑ Pape, Gerrit. "use with traditional init". Retrieved 11 August 2014.

External links