Start a PID1 paper

papers/pid1.mdwn

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+Title: Futzing with PID 1
+
+I've been working with somebody who,
+I think,
+is the lead person behind a Linux Distribution.
+We've been discussing how to change PID 1,
+and I've begun to realize I know a lot about this.
+
+I'll be discussing Arch Linux because that's what I use,
+but most distributions follow a very similar pattern.
+
+
+What PID 1 Needs To Do
+====================
+
+In Arch Linux,
+there's an early userspace PID 1 which does some preliminaries such as
+mounting and pivoting /,
+enabling the keyboard and graphics card,
+and a few other things.
+
+When the main PID 1 starts,
+it needs to do the following at a minimum:
+
+* Mount /tmp, /proc, /sys, /run, /dev
+* Create some temporary directories
+* Set the system clock
+* Populate some of /dev
+* Load modules
+* Set the hostname
+* fsck /
+* never exit
+
+You might be thinking to yourself that this could all be done in a shell script.
+As a matter of fact,
+that is exactly how I do it on my computer.
+My `/sbin/init` is a Bourne shell script.
+Yours could be, too.
+
+
+Never Exit
+--------------------
+
+That last step is kind of interesting.
+If PID 1 ever exits,
+the kernel panics and basically halts.
+So you want your PID 1 to stay running forever,
+even after something has powered down or rebooted the computer.
+
+Because of this requirement,
+it's typical to have PID 1 manage
+keeping important programs (daemons) running.
+There are all sorts of approaches to this,
+ranging from systemd at the heavy end,
+doing all sorts of things like managing hardware and communicating over dbus;
+to runit at the light end,
+managing only the starting and stopping of supervisors,
+which themselves manage the daemons.
+
+
+How Runit Manages Daemons
+==================
+
+I use runit as my daemon manager.
+Specifically, the runit from busybox, 
+but Gerrit Pape's runit is almost identical as far as this article is concerned.
+
+Runit starts off as a program called `runsvdir`,
+which is what my `/sbin/init` hands off to with
+`exec runsvdir /var/service`.
+`runsvdir` has a fairly simple job:
+start a new `runsv` process for each subdirectory of `/var/service`.
+If a `runsv` process dies, restart it.
+
+runsv
+-------
+
+`runsv`, in turn, runs the `run` script in the subdirectory.
+When `run` exits, it runs `finish`, waits a few seconds,
+and runs `run` again, until the end of time.
+
+If there is a `log` directory,
+its `run` and `finish` scripts are handled the same way,
+except that stdout from the parent's `run` is piped to
+stdin on the log's `run`.
+
+This simple approach makes it pretty easy to keep services alive,
+provided they can stay in the foreground.
+For example, here's the `run` script I use for `sshd`:
+
+	#! /bin/sh
+	exec 2>&1
+	exec /usr/bin/sshd -D -e
+	
+That redirects stderr to stdout, for the logger.
+Then it runs sshd in the foreground (the "no daemon" mode),
+and logs to stderr (now stdout).
+
+There are a few wrinkles to what `runsv` does.
+If the file `down` exists,
+it doesn't try to start `run`.
+And there's an `sv` program for communicating with `runsv`.
+
+sv
+----
+
+The `sv` program communicates with an instance of `runsv`
+through some magic pipes in the `supervise` directory.
+`sv` has a few common commands,
+and a few obscure ones.
+I'll go over the common ones.
+
+`sv status foo` asks runsv what the current status of the `foo` service is.
+It will tell you what state it's trying to maintain,
+what state it's actually in,
+and how long it's been in that state.
+It also reports back about the log service for that directory,
+if there is one.
+
+`sv up foo` tells runsv to strive to have the `foo` service up.
+That means it will run the `run` script as detailed above.
+
+`sv -v up foo` is just like `sv up`,
+except the `-v` causes `sv` to wait until the service is confirmed up.
+It will wait up to 7 seconds (you can set the time with `-w`)
+for the service to be in the `running` state,
+and will also run the `check` script in the service directory,
+if there is one,
+to perform any additional checks on the service actually working.
+It returns 0 if the service is up and `check` passes,
+and non-0 in any other case,
+so this is the command you want to use in a `run` script
+to make sure a dependency has started.
+
+`sv down foo` tells runsv to strive to have the `foo` service down.
+(`runsv` will try to kill it.)
+
+There are more `sv` commands,
+but these are the ones I use most frequently.
+
+Important Services
+===============
+
+The init steps above will get your machine booted,
+but it might not be very useful.
+For instance,
+you might like to be able to log in.
+You'll want to run a `getty` for that,
+and maybe something like `xdm` or `gdm` to log in to X11.
+
+Kernel Uevents
+-------------------
+
+The Linux kernel sends out something called a "uevent"
+whenever the hardware configuration changes.
+For instance, when a new USB device is plugged in.
+The usual program to handle these is called `udev`,
+which is now part of `systemd`.
+Busybox comes with one called `mdev` that does a lot of what `udev` provides.
+
+I'll detail that here at some point.