init observations

Paul A Houle ph18 at cornell.edu
Tue Nov 15 22:11:40 UTC 2005


Jeff Spaleta wrote:

>This is why we need to see initng booting a default set of services
>side-by-side with a SysVinit.
>Its very much an open question as to whether there is much win at all
>here... and exactly which segment would be expected to benefit. Luke's
>images don't  come close to telling a real comparitive story about
>boottime. Out of all the potential benefits I see the boottime
>argument as least compelling, and most speculative... so its probably
>best not to focus on this item at all.
>  
>
    In the past,  boot times have been a major complaint of ordinary 
consumers.

    A few years back,  we bought a computer for my sister-in-law.  It 
came with Windows XP at about the time Win XP first came out.  In six 
months they installed a huge amount of junkware on it,  which finally 
made the machine inoperable.  The last straw was a keyboard driver for a 
keyboard with idiot buttons (connect to AOL...) that put up a modal 
dialog box that asked if I wanted to upgrade the keyboard driver that 
stopped me from fixing another serious problem with the start sequence.

    So,  we think,  they want to browse the web,  let's set them up with 
Linux -- I think it was RH 9.  At least they're not going to trash the 
machine by installing junkware.

    Laura's first complaint about the machine was that it took forever 
to boot,  and I realized she was right.  I took about 2/3 of the stuff 
out of the boot sequence (HP laserjet drivers,  asian language input 
methods...),  and things got a lot better.

    FC3 and RHEL 4 made a great leap forward.  When I installed RHEL 4 
on an old 400 MhZ machine,  I booted the machine for the first time,  
turned my back on it,  expected it to still be grinding,  and was amazed 
to see that it was already up!

    The starting and stopping experience makes a big difference in the 
experience of a computer.  If it takes forever to boot your computer,  
you leave it on all the time,  wasting electricity and being a bigger 
target for hackers.  My pet peeve with Windows and MacOS X right now is 
that these operating systems usually don't shut down when I hit the 
shutdown button.  They mollycoddle bad-behaving applications,  so often 
I have to hang around for 5 minutes after a shutdown to make sure I 
haven't missed any dialog boxes.  My wife often leaves our Mac on all 
night because she hits "shutdown" and doesn't hang around to close all 
my terminal windows,  and I often find that my Windows machine at the 
office is still on in the morning after I thought I shut it down at 
night and took off in a hurry to catch the bus.





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