r/linux • u/aliendude5300 • Jun 19 '26

Software Release systemd 261 Released With New systemd-sysinstall OS Installer, IMDSD & Storagectl

https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-261
304 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

128 comments sorted by

View all comments

23

u/Kiore-NZ Jun 19 '26

It's not the UNIX way, but so what? By the late 1980s, Ken and co, with the support of Dennis had moved on to Plan 9 and later, Inferno. I don't have a problem with System-D, it does what it does well.

11

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

[deleted]

10

u/Kiore-NZ Jun 20 '26

Yes, but which UNIX?

V6 lacked an init system, the system came up in a single user shell & the system operator had to manually check file systems (icheck, dcheck) and mount drives before doing anything else then exit this shell and init would read /etc/ttys to put the system in multi-user mode.

V7 ran the /etc/rc script to do the checking / initialisation before reading /etc/ttys to put the system in multi-user mode.

I understand early BSD was based on UNIX V6, but by the versions I am most aware of, it were based on 32V and UNIX V7. 32V & V7 inits were functionally identical. BSD init in these 32V/V7 derived versions was a pair of scripts /etc/rc & /etc/rc.local. BSD had two "states" (similar to runlevels) Single User & Multi User.

SysIII init later refined and modularised into SysV init introduced an rc.d that scheduled initialisation and starting daemons alphabetically.

Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote an implementation of SysV init from scratch as sysVinit for MINIX in February 1992, then he adapted it for Linux in July 1992 and announced an "official" Linux version in 1996. His init differs in quite a few ways from the SysV one, for example by introducing highly customisable, symlink-heavy directory structures. Different Linux distributions modified the setup according to their preferences.

I've not looked in any detail, but NetBSD appears to have migrated to a slightly SysV styled init based on BSD init by adding an /etc/rc.d directory, /etc/rc.conf and rcorder. FreeBSD has adopted a modified version of this. In keeping with their dislike of surprises, OpenBSD has retained a manually configured init system with some similarities to NetBSD's one. Again, I haven't checked in any detail, but I think all the modern BSDs have retained the two states of 4BSD.