Greetings, in the last months there have been many discussions about init systems, especially systemd. The current state seems to make no one really happy - the current Arch Linux init system is a bit minimal and gets the job done, but it's not superawesome. There's things like init script dependencies that would be nice to have, but then it's about the smallest of all init systems around. On the other hand systemd is just Not The Unix Way, it consolidates everything into one huge process and forces some impossible dependencies (dbus? udev? on my server?! and you expect a linux 3.0+ kernel? waaah!). But "everyone else" is moving to systemd, so where does that leave us? (One might notice that "everyone else" is just Fedora/RHEL at the moment, with (open)SuSE tagging along, and most others still not committed to a migration yet) As an alternative to the One Process For Everything I'd like to ask you to evalute OpenRC as an init system for Arch Linux. While Gentoo is by far the largest user it's definitely not the only one - there are the direct derivatives (Sabayon, pentoo, funtoo, sysrescuecd, tinhat, ...) and some "foreign" users (Alpine, a debian derivative, uses OpenRC) What we offer you is a modern, slim, userfriendly init system with minimal dependencies. All you need is a C99 compiler and a posix sh! The list of features is long and tedious (see http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC ), but the critical bits are: * portable - we have it running on Linux, *BSD, and there's no reason why it should fail on other unixoid platforms * dependency-based init scripts - no need to manually figure out the startup order, something like "before apache, after logger" is all you need to specify * small footprint - 10k LoC C99, ~3k LoC Posix SH out of the box (plus your own init scripts, of course) * friendly responsive upstream (let's figure out how we can cooperate, eh?) * boring - deterministic reproducable bootup, including interactive mode and verbose debug output For a long time we haven't done any active advertising, but OpenRC is now about 5 years old, and it is a drop-in replacement for our previous "baselayout" init system (which was started over a decade ago). We don't try to take over the world, we just create the best solution for our needs. And those go all the way from embedded systems (where you can use busybox for all the shell tools) to servers (minimal deps! No mandatory udev or dbus!) and desktops (including optional splash screen eyecandy and whatever makes you happy). There's pretty good support for advanced usage like SELinux, built-in support for ulimit and cgroups to do per-service resource limits, and it even comes with a friendly license (although some might say that a 2-clause BSD license it too friendly and promiscuous). And as a random bonus feature you get stupid-fast bootup - We've seen <5sec from bootloader handover to login prompt (depending on hardware and amount of services started, of course) and <5sec for rebooting a kvm guest. Should you decide to switch (or just evaluate if switching is possible / makes sense) you'll get full support from us in migrating init scripts and figuring out all the nontrivial changes. Just visit us on IRC ( #openrc on irc.freenode.net), send us a mail ( openrc@xxxxxxxxxx ) or meet us for a beer or two. Thanks for your consideration, Patrick Lauer Gentoo Developer, OpenRC co-maintainer
