Sat 30 Sep 2006
sysinit Runs before any boot or bootwait processes. wait Runs the process upon entering the run mode, and init waits for the process to complete. The last field in an inittab entry is the process field. It contains the process that init executes. The process appears in the exact format that is used to execute the process from the command line. Therefore, the process field starts with the name of the process that is to be executed, and follows it with the arguments that will be passed to that process. For example, /sbin/shutdown t3 r now, which is the process executed when Ctrl+Alt+Del is pressed, is the same command that could be typed at the shell prompt to reboot the system. Special-Purpose Entries Using what you have just learned about the syntax of the inittab file, take a closer look at the sample in Listing 1.4. You can ignore most of the file; more than half of it consists of comments. Many of the other lines are entries that are used only for special functions: The id entry defines the default runlevel, which is usually 3 for a text console or 5 for an X console. The ud entry calls the /sbin/update process, which cleans up the I/O buffers before disk I/ O starts in order to protect the integrity of the disks. The pf, pr, and ca entries are invoked only by special interrupts. Warning Some administrators are tempted to change the ca entry to eliminate the ability to reboot the system with the three-finger salute. This is not a bad idea for server systems, but don’t do it for desktop systems. Users need to have a method to force a graceful shutdown when things go wrong. If it is disabled, the user might resort to the power switch, which can result in lost data and other disk troubles. Six of the lines in the inittab file start and when necessary, restart the getty processes that provide virtual terminal services. One example from Listing 1.4 explains them all: 3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3 The label field contains a 3, which is the numeric suffix of the device, tty3, to which the process is attached. This getty is started for runlevels 2, 3, 4, and 5. When the process terminates (for example, when a user terminates the connection to the device), the process is immediately restarted by init. The pathname of the process that is to be started is /sbin/mingetty. Red Hat uses mingetty, which is a minimal version of getty that is specifically designed for virtual terminal support. On a Caldera 2.2 system, the pathname would be /sbin/getty with the VC command-line option, which tells getty that it is servicing a virtual terminal. The result, however, would be the same: to start a virtual terminal service process for tty3. Every runlevel that accepts terminal input uses getty. Runlevel 5 has one additional entry in the inittab file to start an X terminal: x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon 28
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