In the beginning, Linux was a free general purpose OS and it was not clear how Linux companies would generate profits out of it. In 1999 RedHat company went public and started to develop a real business plan. After a few years, in 2003, one of its main competitors, SuSE Linux, was acquired by Novell. Since then, both companies worked hard to reduce their involvement in desktop solutions and develop a segment known as “server market”.

One of the key technologies of enterprise server market is Storage Area Network: an infrastructure that abstracts storage resources. When Linux companies started to compete in server market, Linux had support for accessing SAN storages (Fibrechannel and iSCSI drivers), advanced disk partitioning support (LVM and EVMS), but no free shared-storage filesystem. So RedHat acquired Sistina’s GFS, a shared-storage filesystem, imported some work from OpenGFS developers, released it under Open Source license and evolved it to GFS2.

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Under UNIX-like operating systems, there are several ways to manage long-running processes such as daemons. Process management is a crucial aspect of system maintainance and therefore it’s one of the aspects to take into account when planning a deployment. Since available solutions are getting more and more complex and specialized, I thought of writing a series of articles to recap the state of the art and draw up a comparative analysis.

This post deals with two system-wide alternatives, sysinitv and Mac OS X’s launchd: the first represents the tradition, while the latter represent innovation. Feel free to use comments to share your tips.

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