A history of modern init systems (1992-2015)
Post by: bond
The subject of process management, supervision and init(8) for Unix-like systems is one plagued by a large degree of ahistoricity and “pop culture” explanations. This leads to a lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding feature sets and how one formulates the problems surrounding reliable process management on Unix in general, making it a ripe topic for demagogues of all persuasions.
Where GNU/Linux is concerned, the most common chronology given is that first there was sysvinit. It sucked for a long time, but for whatever reason no one did anything about it until Apple created launchd, which inspired Ubuntu to make (or depending on who you sympathize with, NIH) Upstart only to hamper it with a CLA. Then in 2010 systemd changes everything. Oh, and in the meantime, Gentoo did something called OpenRC or whatever.
Indeed, the timeline of events and solutions is poorly understood, which very often colors perceptions about just how novel existing solutions are. Most critically, without a good historical understanding, you are unable to learn from the mistakes of previous undertakings and perhaps end up unnecessarily making the same errors in your design.
The purpose of this article is to set the record straight on the history of attempts to create "modern" init systems, where we define “modern” somewhat broadly as anything that tries to improve the classical BSD and System V styles of initialization and service management.
