With the recent announcement of systemd, I’ve noticed some increased confusion around Upstart and what it means to be an event-based init daemon. Now seems as good a time as any to try and clear that up by describing what I mean by that.
Dependency-based init
Before Upstart came along, the state of the art of init [...]
I’m sure you’ve all by now read the announcement of systemd, and have probably come running to my blog to see what the reaction of Ubuntu and the Upstart author is!
As you know, improvements to the boot process has been something that Ubuntu have been working on for a few years now and this led [...]
A complete surprise to me, from slides of today’s OSiM Maemo Developer Session it appears that Maemo (the Nokia open source Internet Tablet platform) has adopted Upstart. Does anyone know whether they are using native jobs or still using SysV compatibility?
Even the relatively simple System V rc scripts recognise that there are relationships between services, and that in many cases one or more others must be started before a particular service can itself be started: it allows for such relationships to be expressed by using a directory of numbered scripts that are run in series [...]
In the previous posts, I’ve covered the various features that make Upstart a good service manager, but these are things you’ll find in most others as well. It’s now time to cover that which is singularly unique to Upstart, Events.
Start and Stop
You’ve already seen the start and stop commands, which do somewhat unsurprising things [...]
Continuing the series of posts on Upstart 0.5, in this post I’ll be talking about the various ways that Upstart allows you to manage the lifetime of a job. These are guarantees that Upstart provides you so that when you start a job, you know what will happen if that job dies unexpectedly or [...]
In my previous post on Upstart 0.5, I talked about the ways you can define a service for Upstart to manage and introduced the different processes in a job’s lifecyle. In this post, I’ll look into the detail of those processes and their environment.
Upstart ensures that each process it runs has a sane, safe [...]
Next month I am hoping to release Upstart 0.5.0, the culmination of almost a year’s worth of work on it. Comparitively the version that shipped in edgy (0.2.x) was simply an essay to figure out the basics and the version in feisty thru hardy (0.3.x) a first draft. The new version has been stripped back [...]
Yesterday’s celebratory blog post demonstrated that Upstart is now able to supervise processes that fork into the background, as most daemons do. Now that the code has undergone a little more testing, and been pushed into the archive, it’s worth explaining a little bit more of the background as to the how, and why, [...]
quest /tmp# cat test.c
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int
main (int argc,
char *argv[])
{
pid_t pid;
pid = fork ();
if (pid > 0)
[...]
