On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 08:16:44AM +0200, Edward Bartolo wrote: > Hi, > > This is a question about implementing a minimal OS initiator. If > DNG's admins/mods deem this email is misplaced please delete it or > ignore it. > > Till now, I implemented a little OS initiator that calls "/bin/bash" > and then enters an infinite while loop that does nothing. The loop's > purpose is to prevent PID 1 from exiting. > > I would like to have my OS initiator: > a) initiate a terminal before launching it. /sbin/init launches six > such terminals tty1..tty6 > b) prevent this terminal from closing > c) do some basic child process management >
If I can provide my 2 cents to the discusion, before writing a new init you should have studied and understood very well one of the existing ones, and what should happen behind the scenes from the moment your kernel is decompressed to the appearance of a login terminal. I would recommend to start with sysvinit or the standard rc-based init of *BSD. By studying I mean looking into the code of the process that is called "init" and into the code of all the processes directly started by init (e.g., /etc/init.d/rc, in the case of sysvinit, getty/agetty, etc...), and being sure to have understood what is in there. If you don't master the procedure behind system initialisation, to the point of being able to replay in your mind all the steps that init does while having a more or less precise idea of how those steps can be implemented in your language of choice, then you will waste a lot of time. Personally, I think I couldn't start writing a new complete init system anytime soon, despite I might have a very rough idea of what is going on there, the main reason being that I have never really *understood* how console management is performed under Linux (a concrete contribution to this ignorance is the fact that we have had 5 or 6 different ways of managing console setups in the last 20 years, most of them used concurrently on the same installation, but this is not a good excuse anyway...). My2Cents KatolaZ -- [ ~.,_ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ "+. katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it ] [ @) http://kalos.mine.nu --- Devuan GNU + Linux User ] [ @@) http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia -- GPG: 0B5F062F ] [ (@@@) Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ ] _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
