reboot

[Rob Landley]

On Sunday 16 October 2005 08:41, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> On Sunday 16 October 2005 15:35, walter harms wrote:
> > hi Rob,
> > i tried the busybox reboot command with my embedded board works fine.
> > but when i try to kill init (with kill) to cause a reboot ... no success.
> > i suspect that killing init may not cause a reboot under all
> > circumstances.
>
> I always wondered why signaling init was chosen as a way to initiate
> reboot.

So that init can run the shutdown script?

> After all, we do not mount devices by signaling init.

No, init gets execed as the first process in the system and thus runs the init 
script.  There's nothing running _to_signal init, it's the first process.

> We do not up network interfaces by signaling init.

The ones brought up by the init script are kicked off by init.

> We can kill all processes, remount ro and reboot without signaling init.

And on a system where init is set to respawn daemons, every time you kill one 
init will start it up again, and you'll be involved in an endless game of 
whack-a-mole.  (Or you'll shutdown with daemons starting up, doing who knows 
what to the filesystem state...)

> vda

Rob