[LEDE-DEV] [OpenWrt-Devel] Any interest in adding runit to OpenWRT?

[Felix Fietkau]

Hi Denys,

On 2016-12-03 14:05, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> Hi Felix, guys,
> 
> I noticed that ntpd is running on my 15.05.1,
> but its output goes to /dev/null!
> 
> I noticed this because ntpd lost sync,
> but it was not possible to see it because its output
> (which contains this information) is discarded.
> I could only see it by stracing the running process.
> 
> Well, we certainly can fix the ntpd start scritps,
> but this is a generic problem, right? We'd want ANY
> daemons to be run "properly", with their output logged.
> With log size and location controlled. With log rotation.
> Etc. etc etc.
> 
> I propose to use runit tools for this.
> It is a daemontools clone.
> If you never heard about any of this stuff, please read
> the entire email (there is a README at the end).
> 
> For openwrt, this can be particularly easy, since runit
> is ported to busybox already many years ago. It only needs
> to be enabled at build time, and started at boot.
> 
> Thee is no need to migrate all daemons en mass to be run under runit.
> We can try it with, say, ntpd first. If it goes well, we'd use it
> for more and more things. If it goes badly, we drom it.
> 
> Thoughts?
Here's the thing: OpenWrt/LEDE is starting services via procd.
This is a rather essential piece of how we're dealing with system-wide
reloading of configuration and automatically restarting/reloading only
services which are affected by configuration changes.
In comparison, dealing with logging is rather trivial.

Because of that, I think switching to runit is not a good trade-off.

- Felix