this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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It really depends what other init system you mean, but openrc checks all the boxes. It uses shell scripts, but I've never seen any that would be 500 lines long (at least in Alpine). Services can have defined dependencies as well can be classified into groups so you don't need to configure for any specific service, you can just say 'depend on dns' and any available will be run. And openrc also supports running services in parallel.
Alpine is incredibly minimal given its extensive use for containers so I doubt it’d have many services out of the box.
When I say init I mean the original init - sysvinit (I’m old so that’s been called init since the dawn of time).
OpenRC is fine. It still depends on init, parallelism is optional and not standard, and still uses shell scripts (genuinely a bad idea in modern days / I’ve worked incident response and seen how admins never spot a sneaky reverse shell dropped into a init script they don’t understand).
I happily use OpenRC on a daily basis across loads of Docker containers - it’s a great tool in the right hands and super for minimal environments with a single purpose - but for desktops, workstations, hypervisors, or multi-service servers, SystemD really does solve the huge issue of scripts instead of config, dependency hell, and ultimately the problem of handling a lot of low level stuff which most users aren’t suited to handle, troubleshoot, or investigate, especially when things go wrong or threat actors have compromised the system.
Another benefit is, with upstream handling unit config, it’s so much easier to hop distro now and have some consistency with services and networking than what it was like when there was a different philosophy from every distro on things like leasing from DHCP… Saves a lot of time during DFIR.