Steve Litt <slitt_at_troubleshooters.com> writes:
> 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?
It's a matter of taste of course, I think both tools can be used for
most usecases.
With nitro, you'll have fewer binaries and need fewer running
processes, which can be beneficial in resource constrained
environments. My personal opinion is that configuring nitro is easier
than learning to use s6+s6-rc.
hth,
--
Leah Neukirchen <leah_at_vuxu.org> https://leahneukirchen.org/
Received on Fri Oct 17 2025 - 18:30:57 CEST