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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

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pengaru·

> The functionality is key for socket-activated daemons which is a Big Idea behind systemd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd#Socket_activation_prot...

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It is not a launchd innovation, its from the late 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inetd

I don’t fully understand the relevance of that paragraph, but launchd and systemd both work this way, both for similar reasons

I do believe that launchd came first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565780

I only linked it because launchd is the source of the "Big Idea", predating systemd by ~5 years.

Perhaps I misunderstood your comment in interpreting it to say socket activation's an original systemd concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inetd came out in 1978, if we're keeping score.

True! But the launchd style of socket activation integrating into the dependency graph of service startup is what's novel and alleviates some significant challenges to concurrent starting of interdependent services...

The person who raised it just said socket-activated daemon is "a Big Idea" behind systemd. They didn't say or imply that systemd invented it, just that systemd is based on that pattern.

Yes. But the Iron Law of systemd is that you should never mention it unless you’re prepared for a tangential argument about systemd and other init systems.

Yes! I should have explicitly spoke to that, because it wasn't the source of the idea

I was trying to respond to "Why does systemd have to store file descriptors?" with "That's actually the entire point of its existence"

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