[gentoo-amd64] Re: Disable SPP On GCC-4.8.3

[Duncan]

Frank Peters posted on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:45:35 -0400 as excerpted:

> I won't even mention that, until recently, I used to boot my machine
> directly into a bash shell, skipping all that SysV (or other)
> initialization nonsense.  Fortunately, the Linux kernel allows one to do
> just that.
> It always has and hopefully always will.  Booting into bash is very
> simple.  All that is required is to define some environmental variables
> in the bashrc and one is good to go.  All other configuration can be
> done as needed (or if needed).  This is Linux at its very best, IMO.

Now that I can definitely agree with.  I actually have a grub (grub2) 
option that adds init=/bin/bash to the kernel commandline, so I don't 
have to add it manually (at the grub CLI), and depend on it continuing to 
work as an emergency maintenance tool.

It works rather well, actually.  And I believe it's relatively common in 
the embedded world to boot directly to a dedicated shell script as init, 
particularly if they've only a few special purpose commands to run.  In 
that case it's a lot simpler and easier to maintain than a full "proper" 
init-system, and generally rather smaller, as well.

And FWIW I've seen people do single-purpose LiveISOs that boot directly 
into a game or movie player or whatever, too.  Certainly to one coming 
from the MS world it can seem really quite amazing how flexible Linux is 
in this regard. 

Meanwhile, many initr* setups do pretty much exactly that as well, 
booting to a big shell script that runs udev and otherwise sets up the 
initr* emergency platform in case the main root doesn't mount, before 
mounting the main root and doing a pivot-root into it as it hands off to 
the main root init.

And booting direct to a bash shell prompt as init makes a lot of sense in 
other cases where the needed setup is simple enough that a "proper" init 
doesn't make sense, too.

While my main system here is running enough daemons and etc, plus I 
actually make use of systemd's ability to babysit and restart services, 
that replacing it all with a big shell script would be brittle and 
complex to maintain in comparison to actually using an init system 
properly designed for that purpose, IIRC my router (running openwrt, tho 
it's an old installation that I need to update one of these days) 
actually boots to a shell script as init, and it really does make a lot 
of sense at that level.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman