openrc/init-guide.md

OpenRC init process guide

OpenRC now includes an init process which can be used on Linux systems in place of sysvinit.

migrating a live system to openrc-init

Configuring a live system to use this init process is very straight-forward, but the steps must be completed in this order.

• have your boot loader add "init=/sbin/openrc-init" to the kernel command line

The details of how to do this will vary from distro to distro, so they are out of scope for this document.

• Install gettys into the runlevels where you need them.

If you are using the provided /etc/init.d/agetty script,, you should first create symlinks in /etc/init.d to it for the ports where you want gettys to run, e.g. the following will work if you want gettys on tty1-tty6.

# cd /etc/init.d
# for x in tty1 tty2 tty3 tty4 tty5 tty6; do
  ln -snf agetty agetty.$x
  done

Once this is done, use rc-update as normal to install the agetty services in the appropriate runlevels.

• Reboot your system.

At this point you are running under openrc-init, and you should use openrc-shutdown to handle shutting down, powering off, rebooting etc.

optional sysvinit compatibility

If you build and install OpenRC with MKSYSVINIT=yes, you will build and install wrappers that make openrc-init compatible with sysvinit -- you will have commands like "halt" "shutdown" "reboot" and "poweroff".

If you want this functionality on a live system, you should first migrate the system to openrc-init, remove sysvinit, then rebuild and install this package with MKSYSVINIT=yes.