Distributors ponder a systemd change

Posted Jun 20, 2016 7:56 UTC (Mon) by zlynx (guest, #2285)
In reply to: Distributors ponder a systemd change by zblaxell
Parent article: Distributors ponder a systemd change

I'd have to double check but I am pretty sure the shells don't do init's job properly. Signal handing and child reaping, if I recall correctly.

You can get away with it for system rescue, but long term?

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Distributors ponder a systemd change

Posted Jun 20, 2016 14:01 UTC (Mon) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

To be clear, this was never intended to be a rescue system. We did a pilot project and the results were so successful (QA particularly enjoyed having a much more repeatable testing experience) that we promoted it to production and formally terminated plans to switch to anything else. We deploy everything this way now.

I'm not sure if _any_ shell works, but bash and dash do. Any shell that can trap signals (i.e. all of them) and that uses PID 0 as the argument to waitpid (all of them written after 1987) do this just fine. The kernel blocks most of the fatal signals anyway. If /bin/sh is segfaulting you have big problems and you should probably panic the kernel to stop them from getting worse.