[gentoo-dev] idea for speeding up the boot process in Gentoo..

[gentoo-dev] idea for speeding up the boot process in Gentoo..

[Miguel Sousa Filipe]

I'll quote a paragraph taken from arts technica about Mac OX X 10.2 "Jaguar"
<begin>

Boot time is substantially faster in Jaguar, thanks largely to its 
ability to start services in parallel, provided there are no 
dependencies between them (e.g. network time synchronization can't start 
until the network is up.) This is especially helpful when one of the 
startup items takes a long time to complete (e.g. requesting an IP 
address from a busy DHCP server.) Rather than blocking the entire boot 
sequence while waiting for this long-running task to complete, Jaguar 
will continue to launch other independent services.

<end>

This should not be very dificult to do with the gentoo booting sequence. 
Calling the scripts with the '&' in the end of the comman should to the 
trick I believe. And shouldn't ever make the boot process longer than a 
streamlined one.. (theoretically i guess).
Also all smp machines and users would wellcome such feature.

My request is... please put this in gentoo 1.4 ... or at least discuss 
this, because if there are any second effects or technical dificulties 
in implementing it would be nice so see this debated..

TIA
from: Miguel Sousa Filipe (aka m3thos @ IRC)
    'more human than human'

Re: [gentoo-dev] idea for speeding up the boot process in Gentoo..

[Troy Dack]

On Fri, 2002-09-06 at 15:14, Miguel Sousa Filipe wrote:
<Msnip>
> This should not be very dificult to do with the gentoo booting sequence. 
> Calling the scripts with the '&' in the end of the comman should to the 
> trick I believe. And shouldn't ever make the boot process longer than a 
> streamlined one.. (theoretically i guess).
> Also all smp machines and users would wellcome such feature.
> 
> My request is... please put this in gentoo 1.4 ... or at least discuss 
> this, because if there are any second effects or technical dificulties 
> in implementing it would be nice so see this debated..
> 

See http://www.fastboot.org/ for some ideas.

-- 
	Troy Dack
	http://linuxserver.tkdack.com		http://gentoo.tkdack.com

Re: [gentoo-dev] idea for speeding up the boot process in Gentoo..

[Moritz Schulte]

Miguel Sousa Filipe <m3thos@netcabo.pt> writes:

> Calling the scripts with the '&' in the end of the comman should to
> the trick I believe.

I have the impression, it's not _that_ simple.  For instance, the init
scripts can print messages to the user.  When you start all of them in
the background without any kind of decent 'logging mechanism', the
user could see quite some garbage on his screen.

		moritz
-- 
moritz@duesseldorf.ccc.de - http://duesseldorf.ccc.de/~moritz/
GPG fingerprint = 3A14 3923 15BE FD57 FC06  B501 0841 2D7B 6F98 4199

Re: [gentoo-dev] idea for speeding up the boot process in Gentoo..

[Martin Schlemmer]

On Fri, 2002-09-06 at 07:14, Miguel Sousa Filipe wrote:
> I'll quote a paragraph taken from arts technica about Mac OX X 10.2 "Jaguar"
> <begin>
> 
> Boot time is substantially faster in Jaguar, thanks largely to its 
> ability to start services in parallel, provided there are no 
> dependencies between them (e.g. network time synchronization can't start 
> until the network is up.) This is especially helpful when one of the 
> startup items takes a long time to complete (e.g. requesting an IP 
> address from a busy DHCP server.) Rather than blocking the entire boot 
> sequence while waiting for this long-running task to complete, Jaguar 
> will continue to launch other independent services.
> 
> <end>
> 
> This should not be very dificult to do with the gentoo booting sequence. 
> Calling the scripts with the '&' in the end of the comman should to the 
> trick I believe. And shouldn't ever make the boot process longer than a 
> streamlined one.. (theoretically i guess).
> Also all smp machines and users would wellcome such feature.
> 
> My request is... please put this in gentoo 1.4 ... or at least discuss 
> this, because if there are any second effects or technical dificulties 
> in implementing it would be nice so see this debated..
> 

Ok, so when last did you compare out bootup time to say Redhat ? :P

I had to install redhat this week to get drivers for Intel 845G (xfree)
compiled, and man ... its slooow.

Also, adding the meganism to to start things in parallel, do checks to
wat is finished, and what should be started (scheduler), could prove to
be much more overhead then there is already.  Guess you could do it in C
or something, but that will make it less transparent and more difficult
to maintain.

> TIA
> from: Miguel Sousa Filipe (aka m3thos @ IRC)
>     'more human than human'
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gentoo-dev mailing list
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
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-- 

Martin Schlemmer
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop Team Developer
Cape Town, South Africa