"When I recently installed Fedora Core 10, I found that one of
the new features was the use of Ubuntu’s Upstart, a SysV init
replacement system. I’ve taken the opportunity to poke at it
a little bit and see how it compares to runit and SysV init,
especially in light of the fact that a number of features it does
have or plans to have mimic a lot of the things that made runit and
supervised services so appealing.
"According to Canonical, Upstart is an event-based replacement
for SysV init, that handles the starting of tasks and services
during boot. It stops them during shutdown, and supervises them
while the system is running. From an end-user perspective, the
system boots no differently."