Re: libinit idea

from Don Lewis:

> I've got a Fedora server here that has systemd and I've come to dislike
> it.  It seems to be one of those "Do not open.  No user serviceable
> parts inside." sorts of things.
  
> I was never able to get it to start NUT properly.
  
> More often than not, it fails to come up multi-user.  The machine has a
> large number of disks (mostly JFS and XFS) attached to it, and even
> after what I think should be a clean shutdown, it seems to want to fsck
> a bunch of them. Unfortunately, there seems to be some sort of timeout
> on that, so a bunch get skipped and then don't get mounted.  I have to
> manually fsck everything in single user mode.  Then if I reboot, it
> *might* come up properly.  I haven't been able to find any knobs to
> adjust the timeout.  Sometimes, there is just a message that says
> something like "an error occurred" at the top of the screen, just before
> the prompt for the single-user password, with no clue as to what it is
> unhappy about.

> Emergency shutdown can also be a problem.  If I'm around when the power
> fails, I manually try to shut down the machine before the UPS battery
> runs down.  I don't have the screen on the UPS, so I hit the power
> button and cross my fingers that the machine will make it through the
> clean shutdown sequence in time.  It seems to take forever (many
> minutes) and I have no idea what the heck it is spending all of its time
> on.

> The documentation seems to be very sparse.

> My plan is to migrate this function to a FreeBSD server.

This looks scandalously slow.  It reminds me of the time with OS/2 Warp 4 in the late 1990s when I had to close Netscape web browser in preparation for shutdown, and it took 15 minutes because it was a hog for memory, by late 1990s standards.  I had 20 MB RAM, not bad for those days.

What would happen if you typed at the command prompt
shutdown -r now
or
shutdown -p now
?

Would it take seemingly forever?

I would like to try systemd in Linux, can't say at this stage whether I'll like it, hate it, or somewhere in between.

Tom