Slant community chat on DiscoursePro No feature creep
OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.
Pro Extremely simple
All configuration is done via shell scripts and symlinks. Shell scripts can then use various specialized utilities to ease the development of init scripts.
Pro Fast
OpenRC builds on top of sysvinit and adds some more useful features (like parallel booting) while still the simplicity that sysvinit is know for. Because of this it generally boots faster than other init systems, especially when parallel booting is enabled.
Con No socket activation
OpenRC does not have socket activation yet. It will be added in the future though.
Pro Default for many popular distributions
Systemd is the default init system for many popular Linux distributions (Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, etc..). It should also be noted that some of those distributions allow users to use a different init system if they want.
Pro Cgroups processes control
Systemd groups all processes by services using Linux's cgroups. Think about memory/cpu/tasks/IO/Net limits and accounting for any service.
Con Not UNIX-like
One of the main argument that people who are against using systemd is that it does not follow on of UNIX'S core philosophies. 'Do one thing and do it well', instead systemd represents a collection of dozens of tightly coupled libraries. With responsibilities that exceed those of a simp...
Pro Very stable
Since sysvinit does only one thing (initialize the system) and one thing only, it's very stable and it's impossible for it to fail for any problems unrelated to booting the system.
Con Can lead to slow boot
Since init starts tasks serially, it has to wait for a certain task to finish in order to start the next one. But when startup processes end up I/O blocked, this leads to considerable delays during boot.
Con Launches a bunch of processes to launch a process
Every init script spawns at least sh/dash/bash, and probably also additional processes such as cat, echo, start-stop-daemon, etc, just to start a single daemon that may not even be needed at the time of boot. This massive overhead results in poor performance, and is a killer for embedded systems.
Con Ubuntu abandoned it
The original developers (Canonical) seem to have abandoned this project. At least they're no longer using it in Ubuntu.
Pro Small and unix-like
One of the runit project's principles is to keep the code size small. As of version 1.0.0 of runit, the runit.c source contains 330 lines of code; the runsvdir.c source is 274 lines of code, the runsv.c source 509. This minimizes the possibility of bugs introduced by programmer's fault, and
Pro Fast, parallel startup
After the system's one time tasks (stage 1) are done, the system services are started up in parallel. The operating system's process scheduler takes care of having the services available as soon as possible.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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