The s6-svscan program

s6-svscan starts and monitors a collection of s6-supervise processes, each of these processes monitoring a single service. It is designed to be either the root or a branch of a supervision tree.

Interface

     s6-svscan [ -d notif ] [ -X consoleholder ] [ -c max ] [ -t rescan ] [ scandir ]

If given a scandir argument, s6-svscan switches to it. Else it uses its current directory as the scan directory.
It exits 100 if another s6-svscan process is already monitoring this scan directory.
If the ./.s6-svscan control directory does not exist, s6-svscan creates it. However, it is recommended to already have a .s6-svscan subdirectory in your scan directory, because it is used to configure s6-svscan operation, see below.
From this point on, s6-svscan never dies. It tries its best to keep control of what's happening. In case of a major system call failure, which means that the kernel or hardware is broken in some fashion, it executes into the .s6-svscan/crash program. (But if that execution fails, s6-svscan exits 111.)
s6-svscan performs an initial scan of its scan directory.
s6-svscan then occasionally runs scans or reaps, see below.
s6-svscan runs until it is told to stop via s6-svscanctl, or an appropriate signal (see below). Then it executes into the .s6-svscan/finish program, if present; if not, it exits 0.

Options

-d notif : notify readiness on file descriptor notif. When s6-svscan is ready to accept commands from s6-svscanctl, it will write a newline to notif. notif cannot be lesser than 3. By default, no notification is sent. Please note that using this option signals shallow readiness: s6-svscan being "ready" only means that it is ready to accept commands. It does not mean that all the services it launches at start are themselves ready, or even started, or even that the relevant s6-supervise processes have been started. If you need to test for deep readiness, meaning that all the services in the supervision tree have been started and are ready, you cannot rely on this option.
-X consoleholder : assume the output console is available on descriptor consoleholder. If this option is given, and a s6-svscan-log service exists, the s6-supervise process for that service will be run with consoleholder as its standard error. This is mainly useful for a setup done via s6-linux-init, where all error messages go to the s6-svscan-log catch-all logger service by default, except messages from this service itself, which fall back to consoleholder. If you're not sure what to use this option for, or how, you don't need it.
-c max : maintain services for up to max service directories. Default is 500. Lower limit is 2. There is no upper limit, but:
- The higher max is, the more stack memory s6-svscan will use, approximately 50 bytes per service.
- s6-svscan uses 2 file descriptors per logged service.
It is the admin's responsibility to make sure that s6-svscan has enough available descriptors to function properly and does not exceed its stack limit. The default of 500 is safe and provides enough room for every reasonable system.
-t rescan : perform a scan every rescan milliseconds. If rescan is 0 (the default), automatic scans are never performed after the first one and s6-svscan will only detect new services when told to via a s6-svscanctl -a command. Use of this option is discouraged; it should only be given to emulate the behaviour of other supervision suites. (-t5000 for daemontools' svscan, -t14000 for runit's runsvdir.)

Signals

s6-svscan has special handling for the following signals:

SIGCHLD
SIGALRM
SIGABRT
SIGHUP
SIGINT
SIGTERM
SIGQUIT
SIGUSR1
SIGUSR2
SIGPWR (on systems that support it)
SIGWINCH (on systems that support it)

Signals that are not in the above list are not caught by s6-svscan and will have the system's default effect.

The behaviour for the first three signals in the list is always fixed:

SIGCHLD : trigger the reaper.
SIGALRM : trigger the scanner.
SIGABRT : immediately exec into .s6-svscan/finish (or exit 0 if that script does not exist), without waiting for any processes to die

The behaviour for the rest of the list is configurable: on receipt of a SIGFOO, s6-svscan will try to run an executable .s6-svscan/SIGFOO file. For instance, a .s6-svscan/SIGTERM executable script will be run on receipt of a SIGTERM. If the file cannot be found, or cannot be executed for any reason, the default behaviour for the signal will be applied. Default behaviours are:

SIGHUP : rescan and prune the supervision tree, i.e. make sure that new service directories visible from the scan directory have a s6-supervise process running on them, and instruct s6-supervise processes running on service directories that have become invisible from the scan directory to stop their service and exit. This behaviour can also be achieved via the s6-svscanctl -an scandir command. This is the closest that s6-svscan can get to the traditional "reload your configuration" behaviour.
SIGINT : same as SIGTERM below.
SIGTERM : Instruct all the s6-supervise processes to stop their service and exit; wait for the whole supervision tree to die, without losing any logs; then exec into .s6-svscan/finish or exit 0. This behaviour can also be achieved via the s6-svscanctl -t scandir command.
SIGQUIT : same as SIGTERM above, except that if a service is logged (i.e. there is a foo service and a foo/log service) then the logging service will also be killed, instead of being allowed to exit naturally after its producer has flushed its output and died. This can solve problems with badly written logging programs, but it can also cause loss of logs since the logger may die before the producer has finished flushing everything. The behaviour can also be achieved via the s6-svscanctl -q scandir command; you should only use this if SIGTERM/-t fails to properly tear down the supervision tree.
Others: no effect if an appropriate executable file in .s6-svscan/ cannot be run.

The reaper

Upon receipt of a SIGCHLD, or an s6-svscanctl -z command, s6-svscan runs a reaper routine.

The reaper acknowledges (via some wait() function), without blocking, every terminated child of s6-svscan, even ones it does not know it has. This is especially important when s6-svscan is run as process 1.

If the dead child is an s6-supervise process watched by s6-svscan, and the last scan flagged that process as active, then it is restarted one second later.

The scanner

Upon receipt of a SIGALRM or a s6-svscanctl -a command, s6-svscan runs a scanner routine. (It also runs it every rescan milliseconds if the -t option has been given.)

The scanner scans the current directory for subdirectories (or symbolic links to directories), which must be service directories. It skips names starting with dots. It will not create services for more than max subdirectories.

For every new subdirectory dir it finds, the scanner spawns a s6-supervise process on it. If dir/log exists, it spawns an s6-supervise process on both dir and dir/log, and maintains a never-closing pipe from the service's stdout to the logger's stdin. This is starting the service, with or without a corresponding logger. Every service the scanner finds is flagged as "active".

The scanner remembers the services it found. If a service has been started in an earlier scan, but the current scan can't find the corresponding directory, the service is then flagged as inactive. No command is sent to stop inactive s6-supervise processes (unless the administrator uses s6-svscanctl -n or a SIGHUP), but inactive s6-supervise processes will not be restarted if they die.

Notes

s6-svscan is designed to run until the machine is shut down. It is also designed as a suitable candidate for process 1. So, it goes out of its way to stay alive, even in dire situations. When it encounters a fatal situation, something it really cannot handle, it executes into .s6-svscan/crash instead of dying; when it is told to exit, it executes into .s6-svscan/finish. Administrators should make sure to design appropriate crash and finish routines.
s6-svscan is a fully asynchronous state machine. It will read and process commands at any time, even when the computer is in trouble.
s6-svscan does not use malloc(). That means it will never leak memory. However, s6-svscan uses opendir(), and most opendir() implementations internally use heap memory - so unfortunately, it's impossible to guarantee that s6-svscan does not use heap memory at all.
Unless run with a nonzero -t option, which is only a legacy feature used to emulate other supervision suites such as daemontools or runit, s6-svscan never polls; it only wakes up on notifications. The s6 supervision tree can be used in energy-critical environments.