OpenRC

Updated on Oct 22, 2023

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Original author(s) Roy Marples Written in C		Developer(s) OpenRC Developers
Initial release 5 April 2007; 9 years ago (2007-04-05) Stable release 0.23 / 20 December 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12-20) Repository github.com/OpenRC/openrc.git

On Unix-like systems, OpenRC is a dependency-based init system that works with the system-provided init program, normally /sbin/init; however, it is not a replacement for /sbin/init.

OpenRC is the default init system of Gentoo, Alpine Linux and other Linux distributions, which means that the software packages and daemons of those distributions support it, coming with or using the available scripts. Next to Linux OpenRC can also be used on different BSD systems. Its creator is a NetBSD developer, who started the Gentoo/FreeBSD project. TrueOS, a FreeBSD based system is also using OpenRC as its default in its default configuration.

OpenRC provides the following features:

Portable to non-Linux

Parallel service startup (optional, in development)

Dependency based boot-up

Process segregation through cgroups

Per-service resource limits (ulimit)

Separation of code and configuration (init.d / conf.d)

Easily extensible startup scripts customizable by users

Ability to include an unlimited variety of commands beyond basic "start, stop, and status"

Stateful init scripts (is it started already?)

Complex init scripts to start multiple components (Samba (smbd and nmbd), NFS (nfsd, portmap, etc.))

Automatic dependency calculation and service ordering

Proper integration into container/virtualization (Linux-VServer, OpenVZ, etc.)

Proper modular architecture and separation of optional components (Cron, syslog)

Expressive and flexible network handling (including VPN, bridges, etc.)

Support for bare-metal bare-dependency servers

Verbose debug mode

References

OpenRC Wikipedia

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