What are the advantages of runit?

[Member Peter Linu]

Hiyall,
What are the advantages of runit?

Live-USB = zzz-IceWM-antiX21-runit-64-base: static persistence
VirtualBox= zzz-IceWM-antiX21-runit-64-base

[Member iznit]

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smarden.org/runit/benefits.html

This describes in detail the multiple benefits of runit. I have not used runit, just copied the url from a web search results page and eager to know whether others agree or disagree that runit does excel at each point.

• This reply was modified 11 months ago by iznit. Reason: hopefully url is now a clickable link

[Member olsztyn]

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Peter Linu wrote:

What are the advantages of runit?

If you noticed, anticapitalista (the owner of antiX) promotes ‘antiX with runit – leaner and meaner’…
I am just a user sensitive to clean and dexterous architecture. As runit has been perfected in antiX 21 by anticapitalista and particularly by Xecure, sysvinit is history to me. All my antiX 21 instances are runit now.
My modest and very subjective attempt to answer your question (pending anticapitalista’s or antiX experts’ more authoritative response):

– Runit init has been developed to resolve inefficiencies of sysvinit architecture, such as capability of running init processes in parallel, where sysvinit is running them in serialized manner.
– Overall, runit represents more advanced architecture in comparison with sysvinit as one of newer init systems, along with another one called ‘S6’. As I remember there were some discussions in this forum about implementing S6 to replace sysvinit but that did not materialize in such successful implementation so far as runit.

As an important part of runit implementation in antiX is a service manager in control center, I believe developed by Xecure. It makes it very easy to control which services to be enabled when the system starts.

My opinion is that antiX with runit is just the best, clean and most dexterous implementation of antiX.
All my instances (antiX/JWM/runit) are rock solid reliability and efficency.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Member calciumsodium]

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From my experience, on a two core processor, there is not much difference in boot up time between antiX21 sysvinit and runit. The difference is only 1 sec to boot up into icewm. This result was determined by using the start-t icewm function. However, on a 4-core processor runit is noticeably faster. Once booted up, the antiX21 sysvinit and runit systems are essentially the same in terms of performance and function. When powering down, runit is noticeably faster than sysvinit.

[Member oops]

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Hello,
For me, an init system must do only one simple thing, at the best at possible without a big attack surface (systemd is too big and too complex for me). Runit, S6, sysvinit (but old) are in this case. Runit is faster than sysvinit (both with zstd compression).

• This reply was modified 11 months ago by oops.
• This reply was modified 11 months ago by oops.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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oops wrote:

Hello,
For me, an init system must do only one simple thing, at the best at possible without a big attack surface (systemd is too big and too complex for me). Runit, S6, sysvinit (but old) are in this case. Runit is faster than sysvinit (both with zstd compression).

I agree with you @oops:

On one hand, though sysvinit does work very reliably, the one thing it doesn’t handle real well is the ability to ensure that various different processes during startup and shutdown run on as many processors as are available. When UNIX (and Linux, for that matter) were first introduced, there were very few computers, except for extremely expensive mainframe systems, that could take advantage of multiple processors and parallelism. MULTICS probably could handle it, VM/CMS and possibly MVS, all mainframe operating systems, may have been the exceptions.

Forty to fifty years later, even inexpensive systems commonly have several processing units, and often multiple CPUs for regular task handling PLUS additional graphics processors, so it is helpful when the process initialization system (init) can do both fork and exec processes and take advantage of all available processing resources. Sysvinit can do this, but only to a limited degree once the system is fully operational. SystemD was designed to deal with this, but unfortunately the developer got carried away and the tool does WAY more than just init, and that’s why there’s a division and disagreement about it. Runit is also a modern solution and keeps things light, and allows spawning of many parallel processes, but does it in a simple manner, where that’s basically all that runit does.

Runit is now arguably our most nimble init approach, especially for people with two or more processors available; we also have sysvinit, which remains stable and functional, and is available particularly for any use cases discovered in which runit fails to function. Personally I’ve had excellent results with runit; most of the time it’s what I use with antiX.

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Brian Masinick

[Member stevix]

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I’ve been meaning to give ‘runit’ a spin for a while, so having read this thread decided to do a quick comparison. I have both the standard antix 21 (full) 64 bit and the runit version on a Ventoy USB. Booted each one up in turn and these were my observations. No noticeable difference in boot up time, although the runit version definitely took slightly longer to shut down. I also noticed that according to the on screen info, while in the idle state i.e. just the desktop, no apps running, the runit version was using slightly more RAM. Only about 6Mb difference but more all the same.

The laptop I used to do this quick test is old (2009) and is only dual core, but even so my results seem a little odd bearing in mind some of the previous postings regarding runit. So I’ll be interested to hear anyone’s comments.

If I get chance I’ll do a bit more thorough comparison at the weekend, but that’s all I’ve had time to do so far.

[Member blur13]

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I’ve got almost the same netbook as you (Asus EeePC 1015bx) and I can tell you from personal experience that the init implementation doesnt have any noticable impact on performance on that particular system. I think sysvinit is easier for a beginner to learn.

A related topic I started a while back:

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/sysvinit-vs-runit/

• This reply was modified 11 months ago by blur13. Reason: link to older post

[Member Peter Linu]

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Thank you everybody,
I now have a vague idea of what runit is.
It seems that it will not make much of a difference to my single core 32bit laptop.
It also occurs to me that anticapitalista has the power to simply install it without asking for our thoughts/permission. If runit is so superior, why doesn’t he just go ahead and install it?

Live-USB = zzz-IceWM-antiX21-runit-64-base: static persistence
VirtualBox= zzz-IceWM-antiX21-runit-64-base

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Choice, simple as that.
Sysvinit is very stable.
Runit works but we had to spend time with it to find the best way to implement it. Even though runit is pretty solid, sysvinit has been stable for decades.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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We DO have an entire section of images that ARE using runit by default. In the thread I started about what I’m using (antiX and otherwise) I have commented recently on the very good results with antix-21-runit-base and antix-21-runit-full images; I DO have them and anticapitalista has made several of them available.

• This reply was modified 11 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

[Member olsztyn]

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Peter Linu wrote:

It also occurs to me that anticapitalista has the power to simply install it without asking for our thoughts/permission. If runit is so superior, why doesn’t he just go ahead and install it?

If I am understanding (perhaps not) your rhetoric question then let me attempt to clarify this a bit:
Anticapitalista is the originator (some say creator) and sole owner of antiX. He decides antiX strategy and development. These strategy and development decisions he made in the course of evolution of antiX were with vision of architecture to maximize efficiency and usability in a small memory footprint. Indeed, he does not need anyone’s ‘permission’ to decide what will be antiX of tomorrow. And I see this as a good thing… You need someone with right vision and strong decision maker to accomplish such gem as antiX. Otherwise you end up with another ‘buntu’ bloat and chaos. Perhaps the username anticapitalista is just missing the ‘x’ in the middle and it should be more correctly ‘antixcapitalista’…

Regarding antiX with sysvinit and runit init systems, both are provided alongside to chose from. Which other distribution is provided with a choice of init systems?
To further summarize your choices in antiX:
– Init system – sysvinit or runit. I am running runit.
– Window manager – IceWM, JWM, Fluxbox or Herbsluftwm. I am running JWM and DWM. You can even install a full DE if such might be your choice…
– Choice of running antiX with *elogind* or *elogind* free. I am running *elogind* free, using seatd instead.
– Choice of running antiX as traditionally installed or Live. I am running antiX Live, even from internal SATA.
– Choice of kernels. As it comes by default, antiX provides a choice of kernel 4.9 and 5.10.
There might be more architecture related choices, but the above clearly shows that antiX is like no other distro…

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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@olsztyn:
Right on

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Brian Masinick

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