How to boot under F12

Fedora made a big noise about moving to Upstart from the old SysVinit system. But, in reality, they haven’t really. OK, Upstart’s init daemon is being used, and this starts Upstart “jobs” in /etc/event.d, but only a handful of services are started using Upstart “jobs”. The vast majority of services are still started using init.d scripts, called from Upstart “jobs” which simply emulate the old SysVinit rc.d mechanism.

So.. for F12 we have to consider how we’re going to control how services and LCFG components start at boot time. There appear to be three choices :-

  1. We don’t bother with upstart at all and replace it with the old SysVinit and start the LCFG boot component as we have done with previous platforms. We would need to find some way to start those things that ARE started using upstart (ie have /etc/event.d/ files) and there’s a possible problem if services migrate to Upstart during the life of FC12 (unlikely).
  2. We could write an upstart component to manage /etc/event.d, but it’s not easy to see how to configure this from LCFG resources, given that the configuration info for Upstart “jobs” are embedded within the “jobs”‘ code. Given that the majority of services are still controlled using an init.d mechanism, we would still need a mechanism to control these.
  3. We could replace the Upstart “jobs” which emulate the old SysVinit rc.d mechanism with “jobs” which call the existing LCFG boot component. This would involve shipping a patched version of the initscripts RPM, but would be the easiest option.

After some deliberation and discussion we decided that, given that Fedora is still in a state of transition to Upstart, we should chose the least cost option (3) for F12.

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