Death of init != death of kernel?

David Woodhouse (David.Woodhouse@mvhi.com)
Sun, 23 Aug 1998 14:14:59 +0100


The behaviour of the kernel upon the death of init appears to have changed
recently. I recall a discussion about it, but wasn't aware that it had already
happened.

What was the reason for it?

It breaks the established behavioural pattern of the kernel. Specifically, it
means that Alt-SysRq-L-S-U-B only ever gets as far as the Alt-SysRq-L before
the kernel hangs, leaving the filesystems mounted and unsyncable.

Also, it means that if you boot with init=/bin/bash, then open more bashes on
new VCs, the machine falls over when you exit the first one.

Furthermore, it breaks machines that I've set up where /sbin/init is a script
along the lines of...

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0
/sbin/ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0
/sbin/sysctl-ipforward on

When the script finishes, these machines just hang, rather than continuing to
route the packets that they're supposed to.

Unless there's a particularly good reason for the change, I'd like to revert
to the established behaviour.

---- ---- ----
David Woodhouse David.Woodhouse@mvhi.com Office: (+44) 1223 812896
Project Leader, Process Information Systems Mobile: (+44) 976 658355
Axiom (Cambridge) Ltd., Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambridge, CB5 0NA, UK.
finger dwmw2@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk for PGP key.

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