Joachim Wiberg
b9ad9bcb21
The syntax overview no longer describes a line-based format, since that is not what the rest of the documentation shows. It now covers the grammar, the two naming conventions, the nine aliases, and the leading '-' on a path, and it says plainly that both formats are still read and told apart per file by content. Without that, a reader with an existing configuration is left wondering what happened to it. service-opts.md was a list of modifiers to place between a directive and its command, so it needed rewriting rather than translating: there are no positions left to describe. It is now grouped by what the settings do. conditions.md needed correcting. It presented '!' as a condition prefix alongside '~'. It is neither a condition nor a negation, it is a flag on the block that means one thing on a service and another on a run or task, so it is spelled reload-signal and required here, and the page maps the old form to both. Two things the pages claimed are not true. The kill delay range is 1-300, not 1-60, and stop and reload scripts are no longer run without a timeout. ChangeLog.md keeps its line-based examples. Those sit in historical release entries, and rewriting them in a syntax that did not exist at the time would misdate the format. Signed-off-by: Joachim Wiberg <troglobit@gmail.com>
Introduction
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Reverse engineered from the EeePC fastinit
"gaps filled with frog DNA …"
— Claudio Matsuoka
Finit is a process starter and supervisor designed to run as PID 1 on Linux systems. It consists of a set of plugins and can be set up using configuration files. Plugins start at hook points and can run various set up tasks and/or install event handlers that later provide runtime services, e.g., PID file monitoring, or conditions.
Features
- Runlevels, defined per service
- One-shot tasks, services (daemons), or SysV init start/stop scripts
- Runparts and
/etc/rc.localsupport - Process supervision similar to systemd
- Fine-grained privilege control:
- Linux capabilities for minimal required privileges
- Supplementary groups for multi-group resource access
- Sourcing environment files
- Conditions for network/process/custom dependencies
- Readiness notification; PID files (native) for synchronizing system startup, support for systemd sd_notify(), or s6 style too
- Limited support for tmpfiles.d(5) (no aging, attributes, or subvolumes)
- Pre/Post script actions
- Rudimentary templating support
- Tooling to enable/disable services
- Automatic reload of modified configuration files (optional)
- Built-in getty
- Built-in watchdog, with support for hand-over to watchdogd
- Built-in support for Debian/BusyBox
/etc/network/interfaces - Cgroups v2, both configuration and monitoring in
initctl top - Plugin support for customization
- Proper rescue mode with bundled
suloginfor protected maintenance shell - Switch root support for initramfs-to-real-root transitions
- Integration with watchdogd for full system supervision
- Logging to kernel ring buffer before
syslogdhas started, see the recommended sysklogd project for complete logging integration and how to log to the kernel ring buffer from scripts usinglogger
For a more thorough overview, see the Features section.
Tip
See SysV Init Compatibility for help to quickly get going with an existing SysV or BusyBox init setup.
Origin
This project is based on the original finit by Claudio Matsuoka which was reverse engineered from syscalls of the EeePC fastinit.
Finit is developed and maintained by Joachim Wiberg at GitHub. Please file bug reports, clone it, or send pull requests for bug fixes and proposed extensions.