At Distrust, we wrote a dead simple init system in rust that is used by a few clients in production with security critical enclave use cases.

<500 lines and uses only the rust standard library to make auditing easy.

https://git.distrust.co/public/nit

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nine_k 4 days ago | parent [-]

Likely neat (33% larger than nit), but the readme only explains how to build it, not its interface or functioning.

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lrvick 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah we only recently broke it out as a standalone repo/binary, as everyone historically vendored it, so docs will get love soon, but it will be part of the next stagex release built and signed by multiple parties deterministically as stagex/user-nit.

To run it all your need to know is put it in your filesystem as "/init" and then add this to your kernel command line for the binary you want nit to pivot to after bringing the system up:

nit.target=/path/to/binary

That's it. Minimum viable init for single application appliance/embedded linux use cases.

nit and your target binary are the only things you actually need to have in your CPIO root filesystem. Can be empty otherwise.

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nine_k 4 days ago | parent [-]

So it's basically like tini (keep a single executable running), but in Rust?

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lrvick 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yep. The less C code in production the better.

	▲	lrvick 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Of note, it also will handle platform specific bring-up system calls, basic filesystem setup, etc, so it is much more suitable for embedded, server, or enclave use cases than tini, imo. It is mostly used for Nitro enclaves today.