Interview with Scott, Ubuntu and Upstart developer
Scott James Remnant, the Upstart developer, graces us with an interview.
Upstart: the new way to start your computer up — and make it adapt to its environment
The Linux distribution that took the world by storm, Ubuntu, is not only one of the most usable, but it has innovations of its own. One of the most distinguishable innovations in Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) is Upstart, a software package that, in all likelihood, will end up as the replacement for the venerable SysVinit and other Linux initialization systems.
But “why replace init?”, you might be asking? The answer is dynamism. Modern Linux distributions have lots of usage scenarios, and most of those scenarios require a dynamic operating system; what the operating system does depending on context and role is very important in terms of usability, and the startup process is no alien to this fact.
Today’s Linux distributions have lots of behavior hard-coded in their startup scripts. Furthermore, some network services provided by those Linux distributions depend on other services or system states. Say, for example, that you want to serve files through SAMBA — it wouldn’t make sense to start SAMBA if the network interfaces aren’t set up, right?
Upstart solves this by reacting to system-level events — and that’s what it is, an event-based init service. Since Upstart breaks backwards compatibility (at least for the time being), Upstart is also the perfect spot to test another sorely required innovation: parallelism; with parallel startup, services and states can be started and achieved much faster than sequentially, for a number of reasons which basically boil down to taking advantage of the hardware at its fullest.
Naturally, I’m curious. So I decided to interview Scott James Remnant (by e-mail), he who appears as the lead Upstart developer. He’s letting us in on juicy details and a glimpse of his life.
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April 26th, 2007 at 2:01
[...] Interview with Scott, Ubuntu and Upstart developer (rudd-o.com) An interview with Scott James Remnant. [...]
April 26th, 2007 at 3:11
[...] Interview with Scott, Ubuntu and Upstart developer (rudd-o.com) An interview with Scott James Remnant. [...]
April 30th, 2007 at 11:38
[...] * Manuel Amador Briz, at Rudd-O.com, has published an interview with author of Upstart, Scott James Remnant. Upstart is a replacement for init daemon which handles starting of tasks and services during boot, stopping them during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running. Read more at: http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/04/24/interview-with-scott-ubuntu-and-upstart-developer/ [...]