GitHub - InitWare/InitWare: The InitWare Suite of Middleware allows you to manag...

InitWare isn't ready to use yet!! Unless you are doing so for fun, to experiment, or to contribute, you most likely do not want to try to install InitWare until a first stable release is made!

Installation is not yet automatic even on 'supported' platforms!! It is a complex and involved process requiring an understanding of the intricacies of how the platform boots, and it is quite easy to render the system unbootable.

The InitWare Suite of Middleware allows you to manage services and system resources as logical entities called units.

Units are manageable by a uniform interface, may specify dependencies and other relationships to other units, and are automatically scheduled by the InitWare Manager, a service management (or "init") system.

Added to this is a login and user session manager which facilitates the tracking and management of users and their sessions, integrating with the system service manager to assist in tracking. A dedicated user service manager is provided each user so that they may manage services of their own.

Origin

InitWare is a fork of systemd.

The systemd project is comprised by many programs and utilities. InitWare excludes from its scope a number of these. See Dropped components for details on these.

Compatibility with systemd

InitWare aims for a high level of compatibility with the core interfaces of systemd. Unit-files, the systemctl and loginctl commands (provided as svcctl and svcloginctl), the systemd1 and Login1 D-Bus APIs, the sd_notify API, and several other interfaces are all subject to this aim.

Comprehensive compatibility with every interface is impractical on some platforms; some unit options are entirely GNU/Linux-specific and while most have alternatives in spirit on other platforms (e.g. Linux namespaces and FreeBSD jails), a perfect mapping of semantics between these is not practical. Nonetheless, it is important to us that InitWare should be able to run with little or no modification the vast majority of systemd unit-files, and that they should behave reasonably.

Differences from systemd

InitWare differs from systemd in three principal manners:

1. InitWare is highly portable.
2. InitWare aims to be significantly more modular.
3. InitWare is of significantly smaller scope, concerning itself only with system, service, session, and login management.

The Roadmap details some plans for the future development of the InitWare Suite.

Platform Support

The following platforms are supported:

• NetBSD (9.0+): InitWare's native platform. System, user, and login management are all supported.
• FreeBSD (13.0+) as system, user, and login manager.
• DragonFly BSD (5.8+) as user manager.
• OpenBSD (6.9+) as user manager.
• GNU/Linux (3.6+) as system, user, and login manager, but note below that this is not currently set up to build.

n.b. GNU/Linux support is complete but the new CMake build system for InitWare hasn't been adapted for Linux yet. This will be completed in the near future.

We are considering trying to support Illumos (as user manager) in the near future. Please see the Support Matrix for further information on platform support.

Required runtime dependencies:

• D-Bus 1.4+
• On all BSD platforms:
  • libinotify-kqueue v0.0.20180201+ (provided as libinotify in Ports, pkgsrc, and OpenPorts)

Optional runtime dependencies:

• On GNU/Linux:
  • UDev or Eudev (for .device unit support)
• On DragonFly BSD:
  • udevd running (for .device unit support)
• On FreeBSD:
  • libudev-devd (for .device unit support)

To build InitWare, any libraries listed above must be present complete with their associated development libraries. Additionally required are the following:

• a C toolchain supporting GNU C extensions, e.g. GNU CC or LLVM/Clang
• Typical build prerequisites (e.g. build-essential on Debian)
• CMake 3.9+
• GPerf
• M4, Awk

For building HTML documentation, OpenBSD's ManDoc is required.

Building is done in the typical CMake way, i.e. cmake && make && make install.

Licencing

Most of InitWare is licensed under the GNU Library GPL, version 2.1 or later, but some files are under other terms. See doc/Licences.md for details. In particular, where a file does not implement any algorithm or technology eligible for copyright (e.g. where the functionality is basic and obviously implementable only in one way), these are released explicitly into the public domain.

Further reading

• Repository Tour: A brief overview of the layout of the repository.
• General Style Guide: Standards of style by which code and documentation alike are written in InitWare.
• C Style Guide: The standards of style by which code in C-like languages is written in InitWare.
• Roadmap: Future plans for InitWare.
• PTGroups: Describes PTGroups, the simple abstraction layer over the PROC filter for Kernel Queues, which provides advanced (CGroups-like) process tracking on the BSD ports of InitWare.
• Porting Notes: Informal notes on how InitWare's initial port (from GNU/Linux to NetBSD) was carried out.
• Contributors' Study Guide: A short reading list mainly focused on problems of service management on Unix-like systems, written with potential contributors in mind.