Top White Papers O'Reilly Network: The System Startup Daemon:
initDec 03, 2000, 15:07 (0 Talkback[s]) (Other stories by Dru
Lavigne) "In the last few articles, we've learned how to view
and manage running processes. Today, I'd like to take a look at
how all those processes actually get started." "A lot of neat
stuff happens when you boot up your computer into FreeBSD. I
won't cover all the details here, as the FreeBSD handbook does
an excellent job of explaining the bootup process. When you boot
your computer, you have probably noticed that the kernel does a
hardware probe and prints its results to your terminal. Once
this probe is finished, the kernel starts two processes: process
0 (swapper) and process 1 (init)." "The daemon responsible for
process control initialization is init; without it, no other
processes would be able to start. At boot time, init has two
important jobs to do: First, it launches the startup scripts
controlled by rc, then it initializes the terminals so they will
be available for login