Re: [ANN] nitro 0.5, a tiny but flexible init system and process supervisor

Leah Neukirchen said on Fri, 17 Oct 2025 14:55:38 +0200

>Hello,
>
>I'm happy to announce a new release of "nitro", a new supervisor akin
>to daemontools/runit/perp/s6.
>
>These are the main applications nitro is designed for:
>- As init for a Linux or NetBSD machine for embedded, desktop or
>  server purposes
>- As init for a Linux initramfs
>- As init for a Linux container (Docker/Podman/LXC/Kubernetes)
>- As unprivileged supervision daemon on generic POSIX systems

Hi Leah,

Cool! Congratulations!

I'm very familiar with runit and daemontools, and know a little about
s6, so I'm trying to figure out where nitro fits in. From brief looks
at your docs and a 5 minute skim of nitro.c (yeah, I know, 5 minutes is
silly), it looks to me like (but I could be very wrong):

* It's just one executable, not a PID1 passing control to a supervisor

* All state is in memory

* s1 style readiness notification

* Ability to easily mix respawnables and one shots via presence or
  absence of ./run

So to me it appears different from runit. I'm having trouble
differentiating its features and use from s6. When would I use nitro,
and when would I use s6? 

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com