initscript emulation layer fails on start/stop/restart for jobs that don't spawn long lived processes

[John Morrissey]

/lib/init/upstart-job doesn't perform the requested stop/start/restart action for Upstart jobs that don't spawn long-lived processes.

For example, qemu-kvm's upstart job doesn't start any daemons, but rather its pre-start script sets some sysctls and loads kernel modules, and its post-stop script removes those modules. Its job scripts never get called when the init script emulation (/etc/init.d, invoke-rc.d(8)) is used, since no process is associated with the job.

This seems to be the case even in the most recent upstart, in natty (0.6.6-3).

start|stop|restart)
[...]
    PID=$(status "$JOB" 2>/dev/null | awk '/[0-9]$/ { print $NF }')
    if [ -z "$PID" ] && [ "$COMMAND" = "stop" ]; then
        exit 0
    elif [ -n "$PID" ] && [ "$COMMAND" = "start" ]; then
        exit 0
    elif [ -z "$PID" ] && [ "$COMMAND" = "restart" ]; then
        start "$JOB"
        exit 0
    fi

[Scott James Remnant (scott)]

Moved to Ubuntu bug tracker

[Thomas Hood (jdthood)]

It looks to me as if the quoted code will fail to stop and restart, but it shouldn't fail to start.

In any case, the code in upstart 1.4 looks rather different.