eINIT

[Christopher Rawnsley]

On 21 Mar 2008, at 07:40, Robert Luciani wrote:
Not that anyone reboots often nowadays (even with laptops you just
suspend) but the init system has been discussed to death in Linux- 
land.
Well I can understand that for some applications there is a need for  
the computer to stay on, in more desktop orientated situations you  
generally don't have that same need. It is a little wasteful leaving  
something on when it's not even in use. Now if the reason for leaving  
it on is because it takes too long to boot up then surely anything  
that alleviates the problem might convince a few more people that they  
don't mind waiting for the computer to boot.

Most moderately fast computers have timeouts and disk latency as the
bottleneck during boot, not CPU usage. In addition, if we were to
replace the init system, it should be with something that is a bit
sophisticated with features like: service dependency lists, automatic
respawning, two way communication with running processes,  
supervision of
children from parent processes, "user" services, and more...
I'll take your word for this. :)

OTOH, if booting faster is what you really want, one trick that Linux
distros have been using, which seems to give moderate speed boosts on
old computers, is to monitor file access during boot and then create  
one
big file for it to cache before anything else. Another trick that some
have used is to bring up the gui before anything else (a la Windows).
IIRC there is a process called resident in DragonFly which caches  
frequently used programmes. But I am guessing that this process only  
makes a difference post-boot?

--
Chris