init observations

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazquez at ivazquez.net> said:
> On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 16:12 -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:
> > Why do we need to bring up
> > the networking before we start X?
> 
> NFS-mounted /home. No point in being able to log in if you don't have a
> home directory yet.

LDAP or NIS authentication require network for that matter.

Also IIRC, GNOME tries to do a hostname lookup during login (I get an
error sometimes on my notebook).

I think instead of trying to replace the init system wholesale, it would
be better to make a few improvements to the current system.  For
example, it should be possible to mark a service as "background startup"
so boot doesn't wait on it (one candidate is nut; right now I have to
wait a bit while it thinks about talking to my UPS).  Many of the
network services (SMTP, SSH, FTP, etc.) don't need to be available
before local login.

I'm not convinced that parallel startup is such a great idea.  A lot of
work will be required to get (and keep) dependencies straight.  Also, is
it really a win?  Firing off a dozen things at once does not make them
finish 12 times faster; it can make them take longer.

How often do people reboot their system?  Most of mine are typically up
for weeks at a time.  If power management worked better on my notebook,
I'd probably never do a full shutdown.
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.