FreeBSD working on new service manager

The BSD news will continue until morale improves. I missed this two months ago, but Baptiste Daroussin, creator of pkg and poudriere, is working on a service manager for FreeBSD called rcd.

rcd(8) is a service manager daemon called by init(8) (in place of /etc/rc). It reads service definitions from UCL unit files (/etc/rcd.d/*.ucl), builds a dependency DAG, and starts services in parallel. After boot completes, it forks to background and stays running as a supervision daemon (automatically restarting failed services and accepting control commands via a UNIX socket).

Baptiste Daroussin

It's fully backwards compatible, and works on any existing FreeBSD system without having to make any modifications to rc.d scripts or configuration files. In fact, you can install it on a running system, make zero changes to your files, and reboot to use it, which is quite impressive. The most immediate benefit is, of course, faster boot times, but you'll also get several other benefits already found on similar systems like Solaris' smf.

There's a migration path in place, with a hard promise to maintain compatibility with rc.d scripts for as long as needed. This gives maintainers as much time as they need to convert to rcds own unit files.