Re: running init by non-root-user....

You _could_, but init would have to drop privaleges
after doing normal startup tasks, like mounting
partitions, and starting daemons.  Login would
have to be via a daemon with root privaleges, like
xdm, sshd, or just not allow logins.  Shutdown
would either have to be done by hand, since normally
init calls the shutdown scripts, or unmount and
kill things via sysrq keystrokes at the console,
or just not shutdown ever.  If you're going this
far, you may as well rewrite init to call the
startup script, drop privs, and sleep forever,
since it wouldn't be able to do anything useful
after dropping privs.

My suggestion is to just let it run as root.
It's normally interacted with by recieving signals,
and you need root privs to send it a signal if
it's running as root.  So if an exploit is found,
you'd need root to use it.  A person at the console
might also be able to send it signals via ctrl-alt-del
or kbdrequest keystrokes if you've enabled those
in your inittab.
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