Introduction to upstart system initialization program
Introduction In our earlier articles, we’ve discussed the sysVinit and systemd service managers. In this article, we shift our focus to upstart and understand what is upstart and how it works. We’ll also discuss why OS distributions considered using upstart over init or a combination of upstart and init. Upstart was written by Scott James Remnant, a former employee of Canonical Ltd in 2006. It was started as an ambitious project as somewhat of a hybrid of SysVinit and Systemd. Upstart was originally developed for the Ubuntu distribution but is intended to be suitable for deployment in all Linux distributions as a replacement for the venerable System-V init. It was heavily adopted in Ubuntu and partially adopted in Centos 6 and RHEL 6. But it did not become very popular and all major enterprise distributions including Ubuntu shifted to systemd in their latest stable releases being Ubuntu 16.04 and RHEL/Centos 7. What is upstart? Like sysvinit and systemd upstart is a program that handles the system initialization process after the kernel is loaded. The system initialization is a critical part of operating system functionality is it controls the operation of every script and service. Upstart, like it’s counterparts manages services not only during system boot or shutdown but constitutes management of existing services while the system is running and also the addition or removal of services or scripts from the...
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