s6
Software
skarnet.org

How do I perform socket activation with s6 ?

First, it's important to realize that you don't need socket activation. It's a marketing word used by systemd advocates that mixes a couple useful architecture concepts and several horrible ideas, for a very minor speed benefit. Read this mail and this post for details.

So, how do I open all my sockets first, store them, and dispatch them to daemons later ?

Again, it's not necessary to do that: you'll be fine, and quite speedy, just starting your daemons in their good time. You will not reap any noticeable benefit from performing "socket activation". But if you really want to:

  1. Make sure you have an early supervision infrastructure running. Ideally, you would make s6-svscan your process 1.
  2. Start an early fd-holding service. Let's say the fd-holding daemon is listening on socket /service/fdholder/s.
  3. For every Unix domain socket /my/socket you need to open, run s6-ipcserver-socketbinder /my/socket s6-fdholder-store /service/fdholder/s unix:/my/socket. You can do the same with INET domain sockets.
  4. Proceed to your initialization.
  5. When you want to run a daemon myserverd that accepts clients connecting to /my/socket, run s6-fdholder-retrieve /service/fdholder/s unix:/my/socket myserverd. myserverd will be executed with /my/socket as its standard input.
  6. The descriptors remain safely stored in the fd-holding daemon and you can retrieve them again whenever you want, for instance when your service crashes and is restarted.

That is all there is to it. You don't have to use specific libraries or write complex unit files, you just need to understand how a command line works. This is Unix.