From Fedora Project Wiki
systemd
systemd is the new system and service manager for Fedora 15. It provides:
- aggressive parallelization capabilities using socket
- D-Bus activation for starting services
- offers on-demand starting of daemons
- keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups
- supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state
- maintains mount and automount points
- implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic.
It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.
It is implemented around the notion of units. Units have a name and a type, whose configuration is in a file with the same name. There are several kinds of units: service, socket, device, others.