Bug#999589: ITP: catatonit -- Lightweight init implementation for containers
Package: wnpp
Owner: Reinhard Tartler <siretart@tauware.de>
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : catatonit
Version : 0.1.7
Upstream Author : 2018 SUSE LLC
* URL or Web page : https://github.com/openSUSE/catatonit
* License : GPLv3
Description : Lightweight init implementation for containers
A container init that is so simple it's effectively brain-dead. This is a
rewrite of [initrs][initrs] in C, because we found that it is not possible to
statically compile Rust binaries without using musl. That was, in turn, a
reimplementation of other container inits like `tini` and `dumb-init`.
The reason for re-implementing `docker-init` is because it appears as though
all of the other implementations do not handle signals as correctly as they
should. In particular, they all appear to make use of `sigwait(2)` (`tini` does
a `sigtimedwait(2)` for an interval and then will do a `waitpid(2)` even if it
didn't detect a `SIGCHLD`). `catatonit` uses `signalfd(2)`, which [has its own
warts][signalfd-broken], but the improvements over `sigwait(2)` are significant
in terms of stability. Ideally we would just write a patch for the other
projects to use `signalfd(2)` rather than creating a new project, but after
some time spent looking at `tini` and `dumb-init` we felt that such patches
would be closer to full rewrites.
In addition, the purpose of `catatonit` is to only support the key usage by
`docker-init` which is `/dev/init -- <your program>`. With few exceptions, no
other features will be added.
Co-maintainers welcome!
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