While most Linux distributions have long since moved on from SysVinit in favor of systemd for init duties, this weekend SysVinit 3.09 was released for any legacy users and holdouts still enjoying the System V-init style experience.

SysVinit 3.09 comes with two main changes: first is adding support for building with the musl C library as an alternative to the GNU C Library (glibc). The hddown helper program needed changes for enabling musl support.

The second change is adding support to the reboot command for being able to pass messages to the underlying firmware during the reboot process. This can be used for passing information to the firmware such as for requesting the system boot from another partition. SysVinit developers added this support with Raspberry Pi systems in mind. SysVinit's reboot program adds a "-m" argument for passing the message to the firmware.

Plus other small changes make up the SysVinit 3.09 release as laid out on GitHub .