On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Patrick Lauer <patrick@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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 > Just want to point out that on my server I've disabled all udev in the init scripts. It took only a couple of minutes to hack. --Kaiting. -- Kiwis and Limes: http://kaitocracy.blogspot.com/
