Steve Litt:
...
> If busybox init does not require daemons to self-background, I'd be
> even more enthusiastic.
...

Busybox init has its inittab, mostly for gettys, and a boot script,
that is your options.

Having daemons not-backgrounded in the rcS script isn't practical
and I don't think that is what you want.

You can have the daemon in the inittab like:

$ grep ssh /etc/inittab
tty2::respawn:/usr/sbin/sshd -d

and that works perfectly well, you can ssh to the box but only one
user at time, that is a sshd -d limit. Log output is printed on tty2.
My guess is that you don't want that either.

Why don't you start a process monitor, either at the end of the rcS
script or from the inittab. So, in effect let init handle
/etc/rcS.d/S* and the gettys, and the process monitor /etc/rc2.d/S*.

Regards,
/Karl Hammar