Step one: building OpenRC, and force it with a big hammer to replace sysv-rc.

A few minutes later, with even more hacks, we have a more decent boot process which uses Gentoo boot scripts (amazingly, most of them do work out of the box!):

Notice the udev script, which is hacked from the Debian sysv-rc, still has the color scheme of Debian, while the other scripts are just drop-ins from Gentoo.

Of course, this is only a big hack to have the above. There is only so much you can do in a 4 hours hacking session. It will need more serious work to make it a viable solution (like finding a way to upgrade smoothly and allow the first reboot to shutdown processes which aren’t running using cgroup, converting existing init scripts automatically, hooking into update-rc.d, etc.). Though the proof of concept is there: the “rc-status” command works, we have cgroups working, and so on.

Thanks to Patrick Lauer for spending with me this fun afternoon, hacking OpenRC in SID.