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

[Hector Martinez-Seara]

+1

On 25 April 2012 17:19, Nicholas MIller <nick.kyky at gmail.com> wrote:
> sounds better than  systemd to me
> On Apr 25, 2012 9:03 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
>>
>>



-- 
Hector Martínez-Seara Monné
mail: hseara at gmail.com
Tel: +34656271145
Tel: +358442709253