The system startup daemon: init

Oreillynet picks apart init, the FreeBSD system startup daemon. “When you boot your computer, you have probably noticed that the kernel does a hardware probe and prints its results to your terminal. Once this probe is finished, the kernel starts two processes: process 0 (swapper) and process 1 (init). The daemon responsible for process control initialization is init; without it, no other processes would be able to start.”