init

Naturally, the typical /etc/inittab file has many more features than the three-line script shown above. Although bootwait and respawn are the most important actions, several other actions exist in order to deal with issues related to system management. I won't discuss them here.

Note that SysVinit can deal with ctrl-alt-del, whereas the versions of init shown earlier didn't catch the three-finger salute (i.e., the machine would reboot if you pressed the key sequence). Those interested in how this is done can check sys_reboot in /usr/src/linux/kernel/sys.c. (If you look in the code, you'll note the use of a magic number 672274793: can you imagine why Linus chose this number? I think I know the answer, but you'll enjoy discovering it yourself.)

Let's look at how a fairly complete /etc/inittab can take care of everything required to handle the needs of a system's lifetime, including different runlevels. Although the magic of the game is always on display in /etc/inittab, several different approaches to system configuration can be taken, the simplest being the three-line inittab shown above. In my opinion, two approaches are worth discussing in some detail; I'll call them “the Slackware way” and “the Debian way” from two renowned Linux distributions that chose to follow them.

Although it has been quite some time since I last installed Slackware, the documentation included in SysVinit-2.74 tells me that it still works the same. It has fewer features but is much faster than the Debian way. My personal 486 box runs a Slackware-like /etc/inittab just for the speed benefit.

The core of an /etc/inittab as used by a Slackware system is shown in Listing 3. Note that the runlevels 0, 1 and 6 have a predefined meaning. This is hardwired into the init command, or better, into the shutdown command part of the same package. Whenever you want to halt or reboot the system, init is told to switch to runlevel 0 or 6, thus executing /etc/rc.d/rc.0 or /etc/rc.d/rc.6.

This works flawlessly because whenever init switches to a different runlevel, it stops respawning any task not defined for the new runlevel; actually, it kills the running copy of the task. In this case, the active task is /sbin/agetty.

Configuring this setup is fairly simple, as the roles of the different files are clear:

This kind of setup is easy to understand, and you can differentiate between runlevels 2, 3 and 5 by adding proper wait (execute once while waiting for termination) and respawn (execute forever) entries.

By the way, if you haven't guessed what “rc” means, it is the short form of “run command”. I had been editing my .cshrc and .twmrc files for years before being told what this arcane “rc” suffix meant—some things in the UNIX world are handed down only by oral tradition. I feel I'm now saving someone from years of being in the dark—and I hope I won't be punished for defining it in writing.

Although simple, the Slackware way to set up /etc/inittab doesn't scale well when adding new software packages to the system.

Let's imagine, for example, that someone distributes an ssh package as a Slackware add-on (not unlikely, as ssh can't be distributed on official disks due to the illogical U.S. rules about cryptography). The program sshd is a stand-alone server that must be invoked at system boot; this means the package should patch /etc/rc.d/rc.M or one of the scripts it invokes to add ssh support. This is clearly a problem in a world where packages are typically archives of files. In addition, you can't assume that rc.local is always unchanged from the stock distribution, so even a post-install script that patches the file will fail miserably when run in the typical user-configured computer.

You should also consider that adding a new server program is only part of the job; the server must also be stopped in rc.K, rc.0 and rc.6. Things are now getting quite tricky.

The solution to this problem is both clean and elaborate. The idea is that each package which includes a server must provide the system with a script to start and stop the service; each runlevel will then start or stop the services associated with that runlevel. Associating a service and a runlevel can be as easy as creating files in a runlevel-specific directory. This setup is common to Debian and Red Hat, and possibly other distributions that I have never run.

The core of the /etc/inittab used by Debian 1.3 is shown in Listing 4. The Red Hat setup features exactly the same structure for system initialization, but uses different path names; you'll be able to map one structure to the other. Let's list the roles of the different files:

The last item, the rc program, is the main character of this environment: its task consists in scanning the directory /etc/rc$runlevel.d and invoking any script located in that directory. A stripped-down version of rc would look like this:

#!/bin/sh
level=$1
cd /etc/rc.d/rc$level.d
for i in K*; do
        ./$i stop
done
for i in S*; do
        ./$i start
done

Okay, but I didn't explain where the K* and S* files come from. Each software package that must run for a particular runlevel adds itself to all the /etc/rc?.d directories, as either a start entry or a kill entry. To avoid code duplication, the package installs a script in /etc/init.d and several symbolic links from the various /etc/rc?.d directories.

To show a real-life example, lets's see what is included in two rc directories of Debian:

rc1.d:
K11croni        K20sendmail
K12kerneld      K25netstd_nfs
K15netstd_init  K30netstd_misc
K18netbase      K89atd
K20gpm          K90sysklogd
K20lpd          S20single
K20ppp
rc2.d:
S10sysklogd     S20sendmail
S12kerneld      S25netstd_nfs
S15netstd_init  S30netstd_misc
S18netbase      S89atd
S20gpm          S89cron
S20lpd          S99rmnologin
S20ppp

The contents of these two directories show how entering runlevel 1 (single-user) kills all the services and starts a “single” script, and entering runlevel 2 (the default level) starts all the services. The number that appears near the K or the S is used to order the birth or death of the various services, as the shell expands wild cards appearing in /etc/init.d/rc in alphanumeric order. Invoking an ls -l command confirms that all of these files are symbolic links, such as the following:

rc2.d/S10sysklogd -> ../init.d/sysklogd
rc1.d/K90sysklogd -> ../init.d/sysklogd

If this seems too difficult and discouraging, all is not lost. If you use Red Hat (or Slackware), you can think of /etc/rc.d/rc.local like it was autoexec.bat—if you are old enough to remember the pre-Linux age. If you run Debian, you could create /etc/rc2.d/S95local and use it as your own rc.local; note, however, that Debian is very clean about system setup, and I would rather not suggest such heresy. Powerful and trivial seldom match—you have been warned.