the.com/init systems

the first program your computer runs, and the last one it should ever crash.

means the init system is process id 1, the ancestor that boots everything else and adopts every orphaned process after.

from unix needed something to run first after the kernel loads, so bell labs named it init in the 1970s and gave it pid 1 forever.

for instance

systemdruns most linux distros since around 2015, controversially

sysvinitthe old-school shell-script boot sequence from unix system v

openrcgentoo's dependency-based alternative to systemd

runitminimalist init favored by void linux for speed

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