Re: How Unix manages processes in userland

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 5 December 2013 20:34, Erik Fair <fair%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

> So, clear statement of the problem: daemons should be started and managed by 
> process 1 because it is in a position to monitor for their death and restart 
> them as necessary, and log those deaths (kern.logsigexit is OK but not really 
> the right thing, and I was the one who ported it from FreeBSD), but we need a 
> configuration system for process 1 that not merely names all the daemons 
> (services) to be started/stopped, but also expresses dependency for both 
> startup and shutdown.

A possible variant - process 1 needed to be involved, but does it need
to do everything?

We could have another process responsible for starting daemons and
'registering' their pids with init, and init could notify it when one
of them dies (or if the pid is not present by the time the
registration is processed). Whether this could be less complex than
just putting the functionality in init is another question...