Daily Archives: 2026-03-23

The OpenBSD init system and boot process

Posted on 2026-03-23 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: I've always appreciated BSD style rc init, it's part of what drew me to Arch back in the day. Strikes a nice balance between the half-structured mess of scripts with fake service manager frontend (sysV, especially as the RH-likes mutated it) and "enterprise service management system" (launchd,smf,systemd). There _are_ things I appreciate about the regularity and instrumentation of systemd, but the "This is for enterprise manageability, not humans" perspective here is a nice way of addressing much of what makes me uncomfortable about it. I love the point about "You Can Just Do Things.' That principle is deeply lost in modern computing, especially with the iPad babies whose experience is mostly general purpose computers locked down pretending to be appliances, and it sucks a lot of the joy out. Also occurs to me that I strongly suspect the majority of Linux boxes in existence actually use some kind of traditional scripted init; busybox as PID1 with whatever some henious hacked-together-by-last-summer's-intern ash scripts, or openwrt's scripted sysv/bsd hybrid lookin' init, or whatnot, because they're embedded devices.

In recent weeks, systemd has both embraced slopcoding and laid the groundwork for age verification built right into systemd-based Linux distributions, there’s definitely been an uptick in people talking about alternative init systems. If you want to gain understanding in a rather classic init system, OpenBSD’s is a great place to start.

OpenBSD has a delightfully traditional init system, which makes it a great place to start learning about init systems. It’s simple and effective. There’s a bit of a counter movement in the IT and FOSS worlds rebelling against hyperscaler solutions pushing down into everyone’s practices. One of the rallying cries I’ve been seeing is to remind people that You Can Just Do Things™ on the computer. The BSD init system, and especially OpenBSD’s is something of a godparent to this movement. init(8) just runs a shell script to start the computer, and You Can Just Do Things™ in the script to get them to happen on boot.

↫ Overeducated-Redneck.net

My main laptop is currently in for warranty repairs, but once it returns, I intend to set it up with either OpenBSD or a Linux distribution without systemd (most likely Void) to see how many systems I can distance from systemd without giving myself too much of a headache (I’m guessing my gaming machine will remain on systemd-based Fedora). I’m not particularly keen on slopcoding and government-mandated age verification inside my operating systems, and I’m definitely feeling a bit of a slippery slope underneath my feet.

I have my limits.

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