BPbpierre·Oct 31, 2014Submission
65 points · Open discussionfreebsd
openlaunchd
C2013–2021
freebsd / openlaunchd · Archived
openlaunchd
A launchd(8) port for non-Darwin systems
9Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
267GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A launchd(8) port for non-Darwin systems
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:17:07 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year11 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-12-11 00:54:25 UTC to 2021-01-07 20:26:08 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesIt's already running.
https://github.com/outbackdingo/launchd_xml
https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd
Works on 10.1
In OS X 10.10 – Source CodeThe article's not particularly accurate on that note. There is a project to port launchd to FreeBSD, but it's basically stalled: no commits or mailing list posts in over a month, and it's not clear that it's even been successfully compiled on FreeBSD yet.
https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd
In What's wrong with systemdlaunchd makes heavy use of Mach IPC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) ) which makes a port to any other non Mach derived OS a non trivial effort. There was apparently an effort to port it to FreeBSD - https://wiki.freebsd.org/launchd and more recently https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd/blob/master/README.md .
In What's wrong with systemdI'm not a heavy Linux user -- I mainly use Windows and FreeBSD -- but I'm curious to know why none of the Linux distros have looked at using launchd? It's being ported to FreeBSD (https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd); is there some reason it couldn't work with Linux, or is it just being overlooked/ignored?
I have heard that launchd doesn't have all of the features systemd does, but launchd does seem to be fairly solid for the features it does support.
In Ted Ts'o: For those who believe systemd developers are reasonableJust my two cents as I haven't seen it mentioned in this thread:
launchd is the init system used by Mac OSX and has been ported to FreeBSD a few years ago with a recent resurgent effort for improvements [1]. It has been suggested that launchd could one day be the new FreeBSD init system due to speed and feature improvements, but many FreeBSD users think that the init system is a non-issue and efforts could be better spent elsewhere. launchd has also been criticized as to have been developed for OSX and not BSD (e.g. it depends on CoreFoundation features).
There is growing concern that applications will become more reliant on systemd and therefore Linux-only features [2], reducing or eliminating portability to the BSDs. Unfortunately, most conversations about init systems and FreeBSD degenerate into flame wars [3].
[1]: https://github.com/
Read the rest
Here's the link to the port-in-progress of launchd to FreeBSD, if anyone is curious:
https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd
In What should we expect from a modern init system?