Shinit

Shinji, run the services!

What?

A init and service manager in Rakudo Perl 6.

Why?

I want to learn how init systems work and also want to be able to run a systemd based distro without translating service files.

What are the goals?

1. Run shinit on a runit based system with minimal amount of changes (default runit stages start runit service dirs)
2. shinit should be able to run systemd services files without any changes
3. shinit should be able to replace systemd with minimal amount of changes (stage scripts should be written)
4. Develop own service definition with great dependency management

Where are we now?

• shinit can successfully replace runit as init system without changes, but since in the stage scripts runit is launched to manage services it's a bit of cheating, also reboot, poweroff and halt don't work without -f.

What are some problems still unsolved?

• shinit and perl6 should be on the root filesystem if we want to boot, possible solutions are
  • make little sqaushfs with needed libraries
  • force MoarVM somehow to compile to a static binary (iirc there is no functionality for that yet)

How do you run or test this?

The easiest way currently is to install VoidLinux (headless) into a VM, and install Rakudo Perl 6, clone this repo and add a new entry to grub with the kernel command line argument init=[path to shinit clone]/bin/init.

e.g. run the following in a VoidLinux VM (this is still untested, poke me if you need help)

xbps-install -Syu # update installed packages
xbps-install -Sy perl gcc make git wget curl # install needed build things
git clone https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git # get Rakudo Perl 6
cd rakudo
git checkout tags/2017.07
perl Configure.pl --gen-moar --gen-nqp --backends=moar --prefix /usr
make
make install
cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/the-eater/shinit.git
chmod +x /opt/shinit/bin/init

Now you only need to edit /etc/grub.d/10_linux so it makes an extra entry with the argument init=/opt/shinit/bin/init

I'm sorry