On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 12:30:15PM +0800, Uros Perisic wrote:
> If all services are started in parallel, but s6-rc -wu blocks until a
> service is up, what is the difference between simply putting it in a run
> script before the exec call, and s6-rc figuring the dependencies out ahead
> of time?
Hi Uros,
For simple setups (a few longruns) where you know the interdependencies
you are absolutely correct that you could use s6-svwait(1) in run scripts
to control ordering. The hard part comes in two parts:
1. when you don't know the exact dependency set but know that a service
needs to start after a group of services (lets call it a bundle) are
started and passing their internal checks.
2. if you need to have an initalization script run *after* a supervised
program is run. For example, the udev coldplug cycle (the thing that
detects existing hardware) needs a running udev in order to create the
device nodes and while you could run that as a forked process in the
udev run script, it really only has to happen once.
It's these two considerations that caused s6-rc to come to being. While
the first can be handled with a helper function library, the second
cannot without either dumb tricks (supervised processes that set
themselves down at termination, or exec into s6-pause, or the like) or a
system that understands both kinds of services as well as a dependency
ordering system.
Depending on what you're trying to do, s6-rc may be entirely overkill.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, if all you're trying to do is start a
number of services and some of those depend on others before starting
(for example, a collection of web services and web servers fronting
them probably want to wait until the services have started before
bringing up their corresponding web frontend) then blocking in the web
server run script is totally fine since it's a self-contained service
pair. For 90+% of the process supervision world this is good enough,
it's only when you start managing the lifecycle of full systems
(including containers) or very complex service interdependencies does
the added complexity of a service manager start to make sense.
Cheers!
P.S. s6-rc -wu blocks until the *last* service in the start set is up.
If you add some verbosity you'll see multiple services get started, and
then additional ones being executed as their dependencies become
available.
(1) or s6-svstat -o ready and an exit on failure, or whatever.
--
Colin Booth
Received on Fri Mar 20 2020 - 05:00:49 UTC