/etc/rc and potential startup improvements

[Bill Nottingham]

Shahms King (shahms at shahms.com) said: 
> At the moment I have it working well enough to start programs in the
> specified order (whooo ;-P) essentially a python port of the rc file,
> actually adding some dependency information to my initscripts is the
> next step, I'm just posting to ask the question: would anyone be
> interested in this purely-optional add-on if I manage to get it working
> to my satisfaction?  Are there other people out there working on another
> solution to the initscript problem?

Sure, various implementations of this already exist. Not to
discourage you, but you may want to look at:

http://www.fefe.de/minit/
http://smarden.org/runit/
http://john.fremlin.de/programs/linux/jinit/
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rgooch/linux/boot-scripts/
http://www.fastboot.org/

Some discussion points:

- python is somewhat heavyweight. Moreover, you'd need to rearchitect
  other things to make sure /usr is there before rc starts. :)
- Dependency headers are already specified in the LSB, might as well
  use those tags
- We've done testing with some of these alternatives. It *really doesn't*
  provide that much of a speedup just by paralellizing things. At
  most we saw 10-15%.

IMO, the way to faster boot is simple, yet hard: Do Less.

Bill