OpenRCs

OpenRCs refers to the family of OpenRC init systems and service managers used on Unix-like operating systems. OpenRC is a dependency-based init system designed to be simple, fast, and portable. It manages the startup and shutdown of system services in a controlled manner, aiming to improve boot times and reliability compared with more monolithic init approaches.

OpenRC originated as an alternative to traditional init approaches and is designed to be independent of the specific kernel or distribution. It relies on service scripts located in /etc/init.d and uses metadata within those scripts to declare dependencies and startup behavior. Dependency information is expressed with keywords such as need, after, and before, enabling the system to determine a correct and parallelized boot order. Runlevels in OpenRC group services for different states of the system, such as boot, default, and single-user maintenance, allowing flexible control over which services run in each state.

Key features of OpenRCs include parallel service startup, supervised lifecycle management for daemons, and straightforward tools for monitoring and controlling services. Core commands include rc-service to manage individual services, rc-status to query service states, and rc-update to modify the set of services started in each runlevel. OpenRC emphasizes portability, clear dependency handling, and a lean design that avoids heavy runtime complexity.

Adoption and ecosystem: OpenRCs are used by several distributions, notably Gentoo Linux and Alpine Linux, and are available as an alternative init system in other projects such as Artix Linux. While less widespread than systemd, OpenRC continues to be actively maintained by a community of contributors and remains a viable option for users seeking a lightweight, dependency-driven init solution.