system

The system binary, mix: the Mix shell and its enabled headless daemon personalities in one file (decision).

The default Cargo features include noded, monitord, maild, webd and dnsd; each is optional. Services such as settingsd, hostd, portald and compd still build their own executables. The one-system-binary decision describes the architecture; the features in cli/system/Cargo.toml and dispatcher are the current personality inventory.

The binary picks a personality from the basename of argv[0]. Started as mix it is the shell (mix-shell, mix_shell::main); started through a symlink named noded it is the node daemon (noded, noded::main). Each daemon still runs as its own process, under its own unit and journal identity. This package holds only the dispatcher and the global allocator (mimalloc); each component keeps its own crate, tests, version and units.

cargo build --locked --profile release-fast -p system --bin mix
                                              # target/release-fast/mix
mix --personalities                            # each personality and its component version
ln -s mix noded                                # noded, as its own process

An unknown name exits 2 and prints the personalities. A login shell's -mix is the shell.

The Mix language is documented in the Mix manual.

Tests

cargo test -p system runs the identity test (tests/personalities.rs) and the shell's process-level tests, which moved here from cli/mix-shell so they test the shipped binary. Their scripts moved with them (tests/scripts); the manual they check is the site source (docs/mix), and the source guards read cli/mix-shell/src.

The source is cli/system.