Why Upstart from Ubuntu Failed

Introduction

Upstart was an event-based replacement for the traditional System V init (sysvinit) system on Ubuntu, introduced to bring a modern and more flexible way of handling system startup and service management. It emerged in the mid-2000s, during a period when sysvinit’s age and limitations were becoming more apparent, especially with regard to concurrency and dependency handling. Upstart was developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, with the aim of reducing boot times, improving reliability, and making the system initialization process more dynamic. Though at first it seemed likely to become a standard across many distributions, Upstart eventually lost mindshare to systemd and ceased to be Ubuntu’s default init system.

Historical Background

Upstart’s history dates back to 2006, when Canonical engineer Scott James Remnant announced it as a next-generation init daemon for Ubuntu. Early on, many distributions showed interest, as sysvinit had been in place for decades and was increasingly seen as difficult to maintain on modern systems with multi-core processors and more complex hardware. Ubuntu began shipping Upstart as the default in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and continued to use it for several releases.

Despite the excitement, Upstart’s journey soon encountered headwinds. Red Hat and other contributors started developing systemd, which rapidly gained traction in the broader Linux ecosystem. Debian famously debated between Upstart and systemd before ultimately adopting systemd in 2014. Once Debian made its decision, other distributions that had been considering Upstart also shifted focus toward systemd. In early 2015, Canonical announced that Ubuntu would switch to systemd by default in Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet).

Internals

Upstart’s design set it apart from older init systems as well as from systemd:

Event-Based Architecture

Rather than running through a rigid series of scripts in a predetermined order, Upstart waited for events—such as file system mounts, network availability, or hardware detection—and started or stopped services accordingly. This event-driven model made it simpler to create dynamic handling of services that depended on certain hardware being active or particular filesystems being mounted.

Job Configuration

Each service or process in Upstart was defined by a “job file,” written in a descriptive format that specified events that would trigger the job to start or stop. This made configuring a service’s behavior more readable than the classic approach of symbolic links in /etc/rc.d directories.

Parallel Startup

Upstart could launch multiple services in parallel if their conditions were satisfied, making the boot process faster on multi-core systems. Sysvinit typically processed startup scripts in sequence, leading to bottlenecks and longer boot times.

Compatibility

Upstart included legacy sysvinit compatibility, allowing traditional init scripts to run unmodified. This was critical for ensuring a smoother transition for distributions, though it could also complicate the system’s overall behavior if some services used Upstart jobs and others used classic sysvinit scripts.

Community Response

In the Linux community, discussions about init systems can be highly contentious. Upstart initially sparked interest for its modern approach, but controversies arose around the Canonical Contributor License Agreement (CLA). This agreement required contributors to give Canonical the right to re-license code. Some developers in the Debian community viewed the CLA as a hindrance, as they felt it could give Canonical undue control over the project’s direction.

Meanwhile, systemd was rapidly evolving under an aggressive development model. It offered a suite of integrated services beyond just init, including logging, device management, timed tasks, and more. A large part of the community gravitated toward systemd because of its unified approach to managing the entire system startup and service supervision. By 2014, Debian chose systemd, which was a decisive turning point. Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, followed soon after.

Why Upstart Failed

Although “failed” can be a strong word, Upstart did not achieve the widespread adoption or longevity that Canonical had hoped for. Its downfall can be attributed to a combination of factors:

First, systemd’s centralized approach and rapid community adoption made it much more attractive as a universal solution. Major distributions like Fedora, openSUSE, Arch Linux, and Debian committed to systemd, building a large ecosystem of developers and documentation around it.

Second, the licensing controversies surrounding the Canonical CLA created friction in open source communities, particularly those wanting a fully open and community-led init system.

Third, the complexities of supporting both Upstart and systemd in the broader ecosystem proved to be impractical. Package maintainers and developers benefited from standardizing on one init system, reducing overhead in packaging and documentation.

Finally, once Debian’s Technical Committee voted to use systemd, the future of Upstart was severely undermined. Ubuntu’s reliance on Debian’s packages meant that continuing to maintain Upstart required either re-engineering Debian packages to be Upstart-compatible or maintaining separate patches, neither of which was sustainable.

Conclusion

Upstart played a pioneering role in showing what a next-generation init system could look like. Its event-based design and improved parallelism were significant leaps over sysvinit, influencing the dialogue on how to manage services efficiently. Ultimately, however, systemd’s more expansive scope, large contributor base, and community momentum ensured that it became the dominant init system on most modern Linux distributions. By Ubuntu 15.04, Canonical decided to adopt systemd as the default, effectively ending Upstart’s trajectory as a mainstream init system. Although no longer widely used, Upstart remains an important chapter in Linux’s evolution, illustrating the complexities and challenges involved in unifying a diverse open source ecosystem under a single system management framework.

References

Upstart - Ubuntu Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Upstart
Upstart on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart_(software)