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OpenRC is a dependency-based init system working with the system provided init program. It is used with several Linux distributions, including Gentoo and Alpine Linux. However, OpenRC was created by the NetBSD developer Roy Marples in one of those interesting intersections of Linux and BSD development. OpenRC’s development history, portability, and 2-clause BSD license make its integration into TrueOS an easy decision.

TrueOS now uses OpenRC to manage all system services, as opposed to FreeBSD’s RC. Instead of using rc.d for base system rc scripts, OpenRC uses init.d. Also, every service in OpenRC has its own user configuration file, located in /etc/conf.d/ for the base system and /usr/local/etc.conf.d/ for ports. Finally, OpenRC uses runlevels, as opposed to the FreeBSD single- or multi- user modes. You can view the services and their runlevels by typing $ rc-update show -v in a CLI. Also, TrueOS integrates OpenRC service management into SysAdm with the Service Manager tool

Lastly people have asked us about migration, what is done, what isn’t? As of now almost all FreeBSD base system services have been migrated over. In addition most desktop-facing services required to run Lumina and the like are also ported. We are still going through the ports tree and converting legacy rc.d scripts to init.d, but the process takes time. Several new folks have begun contributing OpenRC scripts and we hope to have all the roughly 1k ports converted over this year.

One of the prime benefits of OpenRC is much faster boot-times, which is important in a portable world of laptops (and desktops as well). But service monitoring and crash detection are also important parts of what make OpenRC a substantial upgrade for TrueOS.

Before getting into tmux, a few fundamentals of the command line should be reviewed. Often, we’re so used to using these out of street smarts and muscle memory a great deal of us never see the relation of where these tools stand next to each other.

Seasoned developers are familiar with zsh, Bash, iTerm2, konsole, /dev/tty, shell scripting, and so on. If you use tmux, you’ll be around these all the time, regardless of whether you’re in a GUI on a local machine or SSH’ing into a remote server.

If you want to learn more about how processes and TTY’s work at the kernel level (data structures and all) the book The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (2nd Edition) by Marshall Kirk McKusick is nice. In particular, Chapter 4, Process Management and Section 8.6, Terminal Handling. The TTY demystified by Linus Åkesson (available online) dives into the TTY and is a good read as well.