shutdown on BSD and Linux

[talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr]

Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
x
> 
> I tried upstart on my laptop and got the fastest console login I have
> ever seen: within a couple of seconds of the kernel loading, I could
> log in to my home directory, even as it continued to probe other
> hardware, connect to the network, etc.  The graphical login (kdm in my
> case) takes much longer, I think about as long as with old-fashioned
> init.

This is because Linux lies about kernel loading. When kernel boots it has 
so little functions that you have the impression it is very fast. But all
the hardware drivers are loaded after, when init launches hardware
detection and kernel modules loading. It is all those hardware probes 
which take time when (free|dragon)bsd load. I am puzzled hat nobody mentions
the most widely used OS which has parallel boot, it is WindowsXP. On my
machine which triple boots Windows, BSD and Linux, it is Windows which
boots faster by fast, in fact it takes half the time of unices to be in
graphical mode able to use the machine. But it is clear that at this moment
Windows is still loading stuff, and if you wait that everything is loaded it
takes far longer to boot than any unix. On my machine, Ubuntu takes around
the same time as FreeBSD to boot, faster than the Linux distro i had
previously (Debian Sarge).

> 
> Rahul

-- 
Michel Talon