This is an archive of past FreeBSD releases; it's part of the FreeBSD Documentation Archive.
To get the user-land going, when the kernel has finished
initialization, it will create a process with ``pid == 1'' and execute
a program on the root filesystem, this program is normally
``/sbin/init''.
You can substitute any program for /sbin/init, as long as you keep in mind that:
there is no stdin/out/err unless you open it yourself, if you exit,
the machine panics, signal handling is special for ``pid ==
1''.
An example of this is the ``/stand/sysinstall''
program on the installation floppy.