minibase VS s6

I remember simple use cases for clone() such as spawning child processes with just enough shared resources to execve(). I remember reading a lot of old emails from Torvalds about it, can't find them anymore.

I used to value portability but now I believe in using Linux everywhere and for everything. I like OpenBSD too but Linux is the stable one you can build anything on. What I wanted to eventually accomplish is a 100% freestanding Linux user space with no libraries at all. Maybe boot straight into the program I want to use, just like we can pass init=/usr/bin/bash in the kernel command line. How far could this go? Using nothing but system calls it's actually possible to get a framebuffer and use software renderering to draw some graphics. I'm guessing pretty far.

By starting from scratch like this it's possible to fix all the historical problems with our systems. For example, I think it's unacceptable when libraries keep global state. This can't be fixed without getting rid of libc and its buffers and caches and errno. Removing this cruft would actually simplify a threads implementation. And then there's completely insane stuff that should be dropped like .init and .fini sections:

https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/init-and-fini-processing-wh...

A similar statically-linked user space project I found years ago:

https://github.com/arsv/minibase

A (rare) good critique to systemd can be found here. Written by the developer behind s6, which happens to be scheduled to replace OpenRC on Alpine Linux. For completeness-sake, some of the main reasons why Alpine doesn't prefer systemd do not apply on most other distros.

It got mass-adopted while being imperfect, so that's to be expected. Thankfully its inception and the criticism that followed have paved the way for the likes of dinit and s6.

this page and this page, both by Laurent Bercot, creator of s6.

Of the two I have experience with, runit is simpler and thus easier to get the hang of than s6-rc/s6. Though the s6 (not s6-rc) docs at the author's site contain a lot of info (including apologetics and rationales) that applies almost equally well to runit

systemd: Yes; it's awaiting its "PipeWire". Thankfully, the likes of s6 and dinit are very promising. Though I can actually appreciate that systemd is addressed. As ultimately it helps in raising awareness that will benefit whatever software will replace it eventually.

Arguably this is less troublesome to solve compared to the other concerns. As we're inevitably waiting for the system supervision suite that will be to systemd what PipeWire has been to PulseAudio. I'm very optimistic about this as both s6 and Dinit are shaping up lovely.