Artix Linux Forum

How difficult it is to setup multi init system?

16 June 2020, 14:45:33

i had noticed artix in its repos has all kinds of scripts for various services for all the inits it can install with so i was curious how difficult would it be to install lets say s6, make the same service config as open rc and check out if it runs lil better boots faster and such.
EDIT: i was mainly worried about things colliding each other and tearing my system to shreds

Re: How difficult it is to setup multi init system?

Reply #1 – 16 June 2020, 20:44:11

I believe the dependencies are set in a way that installing multiple init system is without force impossible.
In other words you can have only one init at the time in Artix.

Re: How difficult it is to setup multi init system?

Reply #2 – 16 June 2020, 21:29:36

Strictly speaking, it is possible to mix and match pieces of these inits together. If you wanted to be really crazy, you could use openrc as a service manager with s6 providing process supervision and sysvinit actually doing PID1. From a packaging point of view, doing something like that would be a nightmare so yeah all init systems are meant to conflict with each other. It's not terribly difficult to switch back and forth between inits though. It's essentially uninstall the old stuff and installing new stuff. Be careful doing this of course.

Re: How difficult it is to setup multi init system?

Reply #3 – 16 June 2020, 21:43:55

I had a different init on each of my 3 pc's but one morning I couldn't start with s6. Then I did the tty updates and did a sudo pacman -Syyuu but nothing to do, I couldn't start and had to reinstall because I needed the pc. So I stay with OpenRC and Runit hoping to keep my systems as long as possible.

Re: How difficult it is to setup multi init system?

Reply #4 – 17 June 2020, 08:06:52

See which files are include in each init package. You can install several inits if their files don't collide. However it will require you to rebuild those init packages as long as they by default have config flags making packages conflicting. Also i don't know how is default /usr/bin/init symlink set so i can't say which of them will be chosen as default
Btw, i use sinit and keep runit for the case if something goes worng