Wikipedia
OpenRC
On Unix-like systems, OpenRC is a dependency-based init system that works with the system-provided init program, normally /sbin/init; however, it is not a replacement for /sbin/init.
OpenRC is 100% compatible with Gentoo init scripts, which means one can probably find one for the daemons you want to start in the Gentoo Portage Tree. OpenRC, however, is not exclusively used by Gentoo Linux and can be used on different Linux and BSD systems. Its creator is a NetBSD developer, who started the Gentoo/FreeBSD project.
OpenRC provides the following features:
- Portable to non-Linux
- Parallel service startup (optional, in development)
- Dependency based boot-up
- Process segregation through cgroups
- Per-service resource limits (ulimit)
- Separation of code and configuration (init.d / conf.d)
- Easily extensible startup scripts customizable by users
- Ability to include an unlimited variety of commands beyond basic "start, stop, and status"
- Stateful init scripts (is it started already?)
- Complex init scripts to start multiple components ( Samba (smbd and nmbd), NFS (nfsd, portmap, etc.))
- Automatic dependency calculation and service ordering
- Proper integration into container/virtualization ( Linux-VServer, OpenVZ, etc.)
- Proper modular architecture and separation of optional components ( Cron, syslog)
- Expressive and flexible network handling (including VPN, bridges, etc.)
- Support for bare-metal bare-dependency servers
- Verbose debug mode