Red Hat did use upstart before adopting systemd FWIW.

gravitas · on Aug 13, 2020

> Red Hat did use upstart before adopting systemd FWIW

RHEL added support for Upstart as a hybrid with SysV, however it was never heavily used and not by most of their own packaged RPMs. Spin up a CentOS 6 server, install a bunch of daemons then go compare /etc/init/ to /etc/rc.d/init.d/.

xav0989 · on Aug 14, 2020

But the init system was Upstart. Upstart, like SystemD, can start daemons from SysV scripts. At the time, the majority of distros still used SysV or SysV-like init systems. As long as the newer systems had backwards compatibility with the SysV scripts and the newer functionality were not needed, why would upstream switch to the new format?

SystemD has managed to gain near-ubiquitous usage, to the point where plenty of upstreams now only ship systemd unit files, but I would argue that this change was first initiated by the introduction and adoption of Upstart in both Ubuntu and RH.

Conan_Kudo · on Aug 16, 2020

We tried to use Upstart properly in Fedora. We spent three Fedora releases trying to do that (Fedora 9, Fedora 10, Fedora 11, and Fedora 12). We gave up by Fedora 13.