When comparing runit vs s6, the Slant community recommends runit for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux init systems?” runit is ranked 2nd while s6 is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose runit is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
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 makes it more easy for security related people to proofread the source code.
The runit core programs have a very small memory footprint and do not allocate memory dynamically.
Pro Easy to use
Simple scripts linked to the proper directory is all that's needed to bring a service up at boot, and everything is up and running quickly.
Pro Init purity - does what an init system must do and nothing more
UNIX philosophy, easy to add new services, easy to manipulate, really fast.
Pro Supported by several Linux plumbers
Myself included. Development is no longer stalled.
Pro Runs on every POSIX system
Pro Fast and easy to use
Pro Faster boot time than with systemd
Faster on older systems, especially those running on HDDs.
Pro The perfect init
s6-rc, provides a real Service Manager, a Services Supervisor with Parallel RC and logging, upon demand. The perfect continuation, of Runit.
ISC License, is not a barrier, Ibut instead, is so friendly to Open Source and Free Software Licence.
Pro Rock solid
Portable: Linux, BSD, Solaris
POSIX.
Can be compiled with musl.
A lot of features including dependencies service management.
Easy to implement with the conjunction of 66 which provide frontend file for service declaration, automatic logger creation,nested supervision tree,user service,instantiated services and many more.
Best alternative ever. Work out of the box, PROC was made on Gentoo, Funtoo, Devuan, KISS linux, Adelie, Void, Antix.
Default init system and service manager on Obarun and from a long time ago.
Pro You can use all its components independently
Pro Runs on every POSIX system
Pro Fastest init
Fastest boot speed.
Pro ISC License
Cons
Con Not GPL
Con Slow
Con Development stalled
Last patch was back in 2014.
Con Heavy
It depends on libc, has a lot of code.