rhtoras wrote:

I prefer all systems except systemD.

Did you mean to say Soystem-D?

Head on a sticK really dislikes when you spell systemd incorrectly lmao.

I prefer all systems except systemD.

Did you mean to say Soystem-D?

For my ROCK Pi S switching Debian from systemd to runit (with runit-init as PID 1) saves a significant amount of memory on a device which only has 512MiB to spare.

There are also the inherent advantages conferred by moving to a smaller code base, which is especially relevant when comparing systemd with OpenRC, runit or s6: less code == less potential for bugs to creep in. Theoretical, granted, but still a factor.

EDIT: *you're

And here's a comparison of the binary sizes for the Debian bullseye/Devuan chimaera versions:

$ ls -l lib/{systemd/systemd,runit/runit-init} sbin/{openrc-,}init
-rwxr-xr-x 1 empty empty   18760 Jul 25  2021 lib/runit/runit-init
-rwxr-xr-x 1 empty empty 1739200 Jul 13  2021 lib/systemd/systemd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 empty empty   52240 Apr 18  2021 sbin/init # sysvinit
-rwxr-xr-x 1 empty empty   22520 Apr  2  2021 sbin/openrc-init
$

It does one job and does it well
All this in a very true UNIX manner

been sticking with runit for the last year or so, because it feels so much faster to boot.
one of the cons, i think it's the different way it's implemented across distros.. not easy to get same results as devuan/debian, antix, artix, void, use it differently.. (even though i think antix lately resembled the artix way?). would prefer a similar set of files/scripts across distros, also in order to share missing scripts and make it more widely used, but..., anyway..

If you are interested in playing with the init system, or you are running a service which must be kept going, then Runit and OpenRC are interesting and can supervise the services.
OpenRC is probably easier for setting up new services, with its declarative style of script.
Runit seems to get rave reviews from people who understand the internals, but it does require setting up a directory structure for each service.

It depends a bit on how they are installed, as both Runit and OpenRC can be installed to be started from SysVinit, which takes its initial instructions from /etc/inittab. Runit can add an entry at the end on inittab :-

#-- runit begin
SV:123456:respawn:/etc/runit/2
#-- runit end

While OpenRC replaces /etc/init.d/rcS and /etc/init.d/rc, which are called from inittab.

Both Runit and OpenRC can replace the SysV init, in which case inittab is not referenced.
This has the effect that the gettys would not be started and they must be set up using the features of your new init system. If you install them from scratch, then this may have already been taken care of.

The Runit init does seem to work well.
I did have problems with the OpenRC init, resulting in the system not being shutdown cleanly, so that the file systems needed checking at boot time. When it boots from SysV init, it has an extra run state to pass through and this work nicely and the system shuts cleanly.
I have tried patching the OpenRC init to add this extra run state, but I failed to pursuade the Debian maintainers on this point.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2788
with details of the patching here :-
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=21180#p21180

Geoff