[arch-general] RFC: OpenRC as init system for Arch

[Kaiting Chen]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Patrick Lauer <patrick at gentoo.org> 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 at gentoo.org ) 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/