shutdown on BSD and Linux

[Rahul Siddharthan]

Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 10:28:44AM +0000, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
>> I've long had a question on the shutdown process.  Linux systems run a
>> separate shutdown script for every process that was started at boot,
>> and can take a minute or two to shutdown.  FreeBSD and Dragonfly, as
>> far as I can tell, just kill all processes, flush buffers, unmount
>> filesystems and shutdown/poweroff, which takes about 5 seconds.
>
>If you use shutdown to reboot, it runs the scripts from /etc/rc.d as
>well, but most simply don't do anything.

Thanks Joerg (and Oliver) for your answers.  

I'm still puzzled because in the linux case, too, most scripts don't
do anything (or just send a signal).  And the startup time for BSD is
faster than Linux but not that much faster, compared to the shutdown
time.  If the fork/exec of a shell is what causes the overhead,
then---for a similar number of scripts---the systems should take
similar time to shutdown.

Or maybe it's just that /bin/sh is much faster than /bin/bash...  and
startup has other overheads so it's not so noticeable.

Rahul