The classic init system SysVinit 3.16 has been released, marking a milestone in the world of Linux distributions. SysVinit, which was widely used before the rise of systemd and upstart, continues to be a vital component in distributions like Devuan, Slackware, Debian GNU/Hurd, and antiX. The code, written in C, is distributed under the GPLv2 license.
While the main SysVinit release has been updated, the versions of the insserv and startpar utilities remain unchanged. Insserv is a utility used to organize the boot process by managing dependencies between init scripts, while startpar ensures the parallel execution of multiple scripts during the boot process.
Notable changes in this release of SysVinit include expanded capabilities for the sysd2v script, which converts systemd unit files into sysv scripts. Unused code from sulogin has been removed, along with some debugging messages related to the /etc/inittab.d/ directory content. The documentation for reading /etc/inittab.d/ has been clarified in the inittab man manual. Additionally, the inittab and init man pages have been cleaned up.