init observations

[Bill Nottingham]

Luke Macken (lmacken at redhat.com) said: 
> I've been playing around with initng quite a bit lately and have had a
> good amount of luck getting it running successfully on my rawhide laptop, a
> VMWare test environment, and my FC4 desktop.  Had a few issues right off the
> bat, but eventually worked most of them out (thanks to the help of
> Daniel Malmgren).  I believe fedora related patches even hit their repos
> as well.
> 
> Here's what I've seen so far...
> 
> initng - http://initng.thinktux.net
> ======
> Pros
>  o Dynamic service dependencies
>  o Service monitoring
>  o Automatic respawning of services
>  o Parallelized service startup
>  o Plugin support
>  o Very active and helpful community
>    - Extremely open to getting initng working by default in Fedora
>  o Supports /etc/rc.* scripts via a plugin, but uses it's own format by
>    default (also supports xml init scripts via plugin)
>  o FAST AS HELL[0]
> 
> Cons
>  o Gentoo look-and-feel (brings back old memories)
>    - Having such an open-minded community, giving initng a more
>      unified/professional feel would hopefully be accepted
>  o No inherent D-BUS support
>    - initng's plugin support would allow this to be accomplished (but I
>      would bring it up to the developers; who knows, they might want it
>      upstream?)

One of the ideas was that eventually services would expose
*themselves* over d-bus without wrappers, and that would be the
native management framework. I'm not sure how that would fit into
this model. It could be something to look at, though.

> [0]: I generated bootcharts for a default FC4 install with minimal
> tweaking (removed a few unnecessary services) and FC4 with a
> default initng install.  These are in no way supposed to be an accurate
> measurement of the true speeds of either of these versions of init
> (they are also both running different init scripts).
> 
> http://people.redhat.com/lmacken/initng-bootchart.png
> http://people.redhat.com/lmacken/SysVinit-bootchart.png

Hm, comparing against a SysVinit bootup *without* rhgb might
be interesting, as it's known that that adds to the startup time.

Bill