RE: POLL RESULTS: what installations would you use process supervision in?

From: James Powell <james4591_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2015 23:56:10 -0700

Mostly, I'm interested in a drop in effective init system to replace sysvinit in LFS myself, Avery.

The problem is getting a generalized /sbin/init script written for a desktop workstation. If memory serves, Laurent was working on something of an init shim kit for s6 but I haven't seen much else on it.

Because we have little to go off of without a port to a mainstream OS to draw example from and utilize effectively. Don't get me wrong, Laurent and your example Avery are nice, but we need more examples like that with Runit.

If we had an s6-init binary like Runit, it might make things easier, but it's a big step, but as long as s6 aims to work either with or without standardized init and doesn't aim outside itself, it will go far.

Thanks,
James Powell
Head of Development at Runit-for-LFS

Sent from my Windows Phone
________________________________
From: Avery Payne<mailto:avery.p.payne_at_gmail.com>
Sent: ‎4/‎1/‎2015 7:56 PM
To: supervision_at_list.skarnet.org<mailto:supervision_at_list.skarnet.org>
Subject: POLL RESULTS: what installations would you use process supervision in?

There were 8 respondents.

[ 4 ] A hand-made / hand-customized Linux installation

[ 1 ] A commercial installation (HP-UX, AIX, Pre-Oracle Solaris)

[ 2 ] an installation made with LFS

[ 2 ] an installation made with Gentoo

[ 0 ] an installation made with Arch

[ 3 ] an installation made with Debian / Ubuntu

[ 2 ] an installation made with Fedora / Red Hat

[ 4 ] an installation made with NetBSD/OpenBSD/FreeBSD

[ 1 ] an installation made with DragonflyBSD

[ 0 ] an installation made with Android Open Source Project

[ 4 ] an installation not listed here (please give name and/or details)
for this category, responses are broken down as:
+ 1 condensed summary: runit within a larger project that uses Docker
+ 1 "Illumos-derived distros (e.g. SmartOS, OmniOS)"
+ 1 "Docker Images, Using Gorka's s6-overlay"
+ 1 "Ubuntu and Alpine Linux, but both inside docker :-)"

Method:
An open invitation to the supervision mailing list, with multiple choice
responses being sent to my email address. Responses were tallied on
April 1 (no joke). Each respondent is allowed +1 vote for a category,
although multiple categories are allowed.

Summary:
The poll was meant to provide a broad picture of how process supervision
is used by platform, and give a general feeling to how people are using
it. Even with just 8 respondents, this is informative. From this, some
(personally biased) observations:

* Docker, which is not an OS but a container solution, has a surprising
amount of interest. I haven't had time to play with Docker yet so I can
only guess as to why - perhaps the low overhead and/or storage
requirements that come with this model lend to making for "slim" containers?

* People have a very keen interest in using supervision with *BSD, with
4 responders using it in some fashion. Perhaps some "outreach" to those
communities is in order...

* I was surprised to see Fedora/Red Hat listed, as these are
traditionally systemd based, and systemd provides a superset of process
supervision features.

* Some of the design decisions in my project came from the idea that the
definition directories should be as portable as possible, because
process supervision is a concept that extends to a large number of
systems, and not just "the one". As a result of that decision,
development has been very slow and deliberate, probably slower than I
would like. Because I'm seeing a strong showing by non-Linux systems, I
think it hints strongly that this was the right decision to make.

A big "Thank You" to everyone for your time, votes, and comments.
Received on Thu Apr 02 2015 - 06:56:10 UTC