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Comment by tinus_hn | Hacker News Reader

Was init?

No, but it's far less complex than systemd to the point where you can audit the code yourself and it's battle tested over the years. Also because it's so simple it was shown to us at the university so we've got essential understanding of how it works and I think they're still explaining it instead of systemd.

But systemd is more than just init. It replaces for instance daemontools, restartd or monit.

Are you saying you can trivially audit those?

Does it fully replace monit? Could you link me more info? From what I could find I didn't see anything like free disk space warnings, web interface etc.

> Does it fully replace monit?

Not fully, no but as far as I can tell, it has overlapping responsibilities.

My main thought when mentioning it, was automatic restart of services in the case of failure.

That's a fair point. However, the parent was responding to whether init - in particular - had been audited. So, bringing up other, larger projects that systemd subsumes is a bit disingenuous, imo.

The complexity of Sysvinit is orders of magnitude less than that of systemd.

The "sysvinit" binary package has had a total of 2 bug reports tagged "security" filed in Debian's bug tracker. That's over the entire history of the package that goes back to at least 2004.

If I extend the search to all packages built from the "sysvinit" source (which includes packages like initscripts and sysvinit-utils), the count increases to 8. (source: https://www.debian.org/Bugs. I'm not linking to exact queries since they take quite some time and HN has a tendency of taking down Debian's bug tracker)

Also crond, atd, and various log manipulation tools that systemd replaces.

It doesn't replace them, it just doesn't use them.

It supplants them with the same functionality.

That's literally the definition of replacement.

Indeed. Not complaining - I don't care for HN karma - but it is very odd that an easily searchable fact is being downvoted on a technical forum.

It provides inferior code and interfaces that are used instead of them.

So you're correct, in a way.

Not if you count in the god-awful shell scripts full of race conditions which it replaced.

Then it should be easy to audit!

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