Re: [gentoo-user] Restart agetty after update @world?

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 3:35 AM, Matthias Hanft <mh@×××××.de> wrote:
>
> But now, there's agetty left, and I don't know how to restart this
> service (without reboot):
>

This is because these are run directly by init and not by openrc,
unlike all the other daemons on the system.  As others pointed out you
can just kill these directly.

Under systemd agetty is run as a service just like everything else and
you can restart it the same way that you'd restart apache.  There
isn't really any equivalent to inittab in systemd other than one or
two similar global settings.

Arguably it might be nicer to treat them more like a normal service
under openrc, now that it can restart crashed services.  I'm not sure
how reliable this feature is (I haven't run openrc in a while now),
and you would need it to be reliable for agetty since most people like
having a console.  Traditionally agetty has been run by init for a
long time though, so there might be some reluctance to make this
change.  Offhand I'm not sure if there are any other issues with
making it a service in openrc.

Fun fact: sysvinit is essentially a poor man's service manager.  You
could stick anything in inittab and init will start it, and restart it
if it dies.  There is just no control over things like dependencies
and sequencing, and you have to watch out because if you have init run
some bash script, which launches a process that forks, and your script
terminates, then init will re-launch it possibly giving you a fork
bomb at boot.  Things like this are why more full-featured service
managers were created.  Even these tend to fall in generations, with
openrc being a lot more modern than what most distros were using
before upstart/runit/systemd came along.

-- 
Rich