Hi,
can you still rely on init being pid==1 ?
PID 1 is treated specially by the system. For example, when Ctrl+Alt+Del is pressed, SIGINT is sent to the process with PID 1. I think if PID 1 quits, the kernel will try to restart it or even panic or reboot. So yes, init has to be the process with PID 1. There are other benefits of PID 1. For example, when a process detaches into the background, into a new session, it's new parent becomes PID 1. So an application running as PID 1 will receive SIGCHLD for any 'detached' process. This is very useful for monitoring services, especially services such as apache, which thoroughly detach. Workarounds present in some init systems such as "pidfilehack" in minit rely on this fact and won't work when init is not PID 1. You can run minit as non-PID 1, but then it can't monitor e.g. apache. Services that have an option to not background can be monitored for sure. This is a reason why certain monitoring tasks are more efficiently done by init than with an external monitoring application such as monit. best regards, Erich Schubert -- erich@(mucl.de|debian.org) -- GPG Key ID: 4B3A135C (o_ To understand recursion you first need to understand recursion. //\ Wo befreundete Wege zusammenlaufen, da sieht die ganze Welt für V_/_ eine Stunde wie eine Heimat aus. --- Herrmann Hesse _______________________________________________ initscripts-ng-devel mailing list initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/initscripts-ng-devel