dumb-init VS bedrocklinux-userland

I think you are on the right track in thinking it’s a signal handling issue. You mentioned using some “bash scripts”, have you tried something like dumb-init?

At the other extreme, there's dumb-init - it implements the special pid-1 behaviors and acts as a wrapper around the one script you want to run. It's ideal for containers or virtual machines that don't need user logins or more than one service.

Oh, and another thing. Many containers launch their main process from a shell script. When this happens, the shell script receives the SIGTERM event, not the application. Your shell script MUST relay SIGTERM events back to the main process, and it doesn’t happen by default. You can use a shell script wrapper, like dumb-init (https://github.com/yelp/dumb-init), as your entry point if you need to use a shell script on container startup.

It's a plus because Gentoo fully supports the choice of Systemd or OpenRC. It also has minit, dumb-init, sysvinit, cinit in tree for the more adventurous. No one was calling the AUR bloat, the parent comment just mentions that Gentoo has an equivalent project, GURU.

, but I prefer to not have to make this assumption and use an init system instead.

[1]: https://github.com/Yelp/dumb-init

> It has no init system.

Apologies that I can't link directly to the "--init" flag but docker actually does have an init, it's just (err, was?) compiled into the binary: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/run/#op...

My recollection is that it either adopted, or inspired, https://github.com/Yelp/dumb-init#readme which folks used to put into their Dockerfile as the init system back in the day

Folks (ahem, I'm looking at you, eks-anywhere[0]) who bundle systemd into a docker container are gravely misguided, and the ones which do so for the ability to launch sshd alongside the actual container's main process are truly, truly lost

0: https://github.com/aws/eks-anywhere/issues/838#issuecomment-...

You can use something like dumb-init which is designed to correctly handle signals

Back when I used a debian based distribution I made use of https://bedrocklinux.org/ to make use of the AUR. It's not for everyone though.

Now this is interesting... apparently it is possible to run Nix AKA "The Nix Package Manager" on Alpine -- despite the fact that Alpine is Busybox and Musl based and NixOS is Coreutils and Glibc based!

Well done Nix engineers and contributors!

(I may switch to Alpine w/Nix Package Manager in the future, depending on how well it works!)

Related:

Bedrock Linux: https://bedrocklinux.org/

Sure, just install Bedrock Linux and add the Arch stratum on top

There's a Bedrock Linux distro already...

Bedrock Linux. It is allows you to make a system out of various seemingly-incompatible parts of other distros. I haven't gotten around to trying it myself, but it's really cool.

If you want to actually use multiple distributions at once integrated tightly into each other (like using Ubuntu with AUR packages) I highly recommend https://bedrocklinux.org/. It uses some chroot and symbolic link magic to share files across filesystems.