State Machine

A service is bound to a state machine that is in one of ten states. For run/tasks there is an additional end state called DONE. All processes managed by Finit start in the HALTED state. The image shows how both conditions and commands drive the machine.

The current state depends on the two following conditions:

• E: Service enabled. In order for E to be satisfied, the service must be allowed to run in the current runlevel and not be stopped.

A service may be stopped, or blocked, for several reasons:

• The user has manually stopped the service using initctl stop NAME
• The program exits immediately. I.e. keeps crashing (make sure to use the 'run this service in the foreground' command line option)

• The binary is missing in the filesystem

• C: Service conditions are satisfied:

• on (+): The condition is asserted.

• off (-): The condition is deasserted.
• flux (~): The condition state is unknown.

For a detailed description of conditions, and how to debug them, see the Finit Conditions document.