What are the current challenges porting dinit to *BSD as the PID 1 init system?

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

I'm going to port this project to NetBSD as an alternative init system to its legacy init program. I'm curious about what are the current issues when running dinit on BSDs.

[mobin-2008]

Hi.

Start by reading README.md and dinit docs. Also take a look at #434 and https://pkgsrc.se/sysutils/dinit for current status.

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

Currently I've successfully run dinit as pid 1 init system thanks to efforts of packaging by @iMilnb . I wrote some minimal service configs and it worked. I'm going to take further research into its advanced features and test their functionalities.

[iMilnb]

@MahnoKropotkinvich nice! FYI I did a bit of work in that direction with my pet-project here: https://github.com/NetBSDfr/smolBSD/tree/main/service/systembsd/etc

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

@iMilnb Thanks for sharing! Will have a try.

[davmac314]

@MahnoKropotkinvich did you explicitly enable cgroups? That's not really right for a NetBSD build since NetBSD doesn't support cgroups (at least I don't think it does!). If you didn't explicitly enable it and it get auto-enabled then looks like maybe we have a bug in the configure script.

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

Yes, dinit --version says that cgroup is enabled, which is really strange.

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

I checked your code and found out what's wrong
You wrote #ifdef SUPPORT_CGROUPS, which should be #if SUPPORT_CGROUPS.

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

I also discovered that when cgroup just doesn't exist, there's no exception thrown out so with "cgroups" feature enabled it could still be compiled and executed in non-cgroup systems.

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

I discovered that reboot(8) on NetBSD will send SIGTERM to all processes before triggering system rebooting, but this will cause dinit to try repeatedly recover the service being killed and reboot will keep killing, causing an infinite loop.

We should consider build a wrapper for reboot(8) to stop all its services first before initiate system rebooting.

[davmac314]

Dinit already has a shutdown utility which includes reboot functionality (reboot should be installed as a symlinked alias). It requires BUILD_SHUTDOWN=yes during build (assuming Makefile-based build). See the README BUILD file.

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

Dinit already has a shutdown utility which includes reboot functionality (reboot should be installed as a symlinked alias). It requires BUILD_SHUTDOWN=yes during build (assuming Makefile-based build). See the README BUILD file.

thx! will have a try

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

@iMilnb Hi, I'm doing some deeper research related to dinitctl and shutdown utility. But I failed to find out where is the control socket (should be /run/dinitctl according to the source code).
I looked through the source code and found out that if the control socket wasn't successfully created, dinit would exit early. There should be logs about socket creation failure but there wasn't. I believe that the socket must be created somewhere but I just can't find it.

[davmac314]

I looked through the source code and found out that if the control socket wasn't successfully created, dinit would exit early

If running as system init and the control socket couldn't be created due to a read-only filesystem, it does not abort but continues running and starting services. Then once a service starts which is tagged as mounting the filesystem read/write (see options in dinit-service man page) it opens the socket at that point.

[MahnoKropotkinvich]

I looked through the source code and found out that if the control socket wasn't successfully created, dinit would exit early

If running as system init and the control socket couldn't be created due to a read-only filesystem, it does not abort but continues running and starting services. Then once a service starts which is tagged as mounting the filesystem read/write (see options in dinit-service man page) it opens the socket at that point.

thx, solved