SysVinit version 2.86 have a problem in its code that leads to incorrectly displaying init name in process list (and in /proc/1/cmdline) -- it is shown as 'ini'. This was observed inside an OpenVZ's VPS. See http://bugzilla.openvz.org/60 for more details. Patch fixing this is attached. Note that 2.85 does not have such bug. Similar bugs found, filed and fixed in Debian and Gentoo. I have also sent it maintstream to sysvinit maintainter(s) but never got a response back. Debian: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=336172 Gentoo: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110420
Created attachment 127410 [details] fix for off-by-one in setting command title for init
Hm, it seems quite possible that this could happen (especailly compared to the 2.85 code), however, I'm not actually seeing this in practice on any machine I have access to. Certainly, your 'ini' example doesn't occur. I'm curious how this could trigger only in OpenVZ. Do you invoke init differently there?
Added in 2.86-4.
Probably the thing is in ordinary Linux you usually run kernel with a lot of parameters, and the ones which kernel itself can not recognize are being passed to init. In OpenVZ, we just execute /sbin/init in a newly created virtual environment without passing any arguments to it.
Package name is now sysvinit in latest Fedora.