systemd is a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts
the rest of the system. It provides aggressive parallelization
capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services,
offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using
Linux control groups, maintains mount and automount points, and
implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control
logic. systemd supports SysV and LSB init scripts and works as a
replacement for sysvinit. Other parts of this package are a logging daemon,
utilities to control basic system configuration like the hostname,
date, locale, maintain a list of logged-in users, system accounts,
runtime directories and settings, and daemons to manage simple network
configuration, network time synchronization, log forwarding, and name
resolution.
