Every time you start your Linux computer, its initialization system launches a batch
of processes, from a few dozen to hundreds, depending on how the system is set up.
You can see this on your startup screen (Figure 4-1; press
the Escape key to hide your graphical startup screen and see the startup messages).
Figure 4-1. Linux startup messages
In olden times we had the Unix System V initialization system (SysV init), BSD
init, and Linux Standard Base (LSB) init for launching processes at startup.
SysV init was the most common. Those days are fading away, and now systemd is
the shiny new init system for Linux. It has been adopted by all the major Linux
distributions, though of course there are a number of distributions that still
use the legacy init
systems.
In this chapter you will learn if your Linux distribution uses systemd. You will
learn what processes, threads, services, and daemons are, and how to use systemd
to manage services: start, stop, enable, disable, and check status. You will
become acquainted with the systemctl command, which is the systemd system and
service manager.
systemd is designed to provide functionality suited to modern complex server and desktop systems, and it does considerably more than the legacy init systems. It provides complete service management from startup to shutdown, starting processes at boot, on-demand ...
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