init observations

[Paul A Houle]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:

>
>You missed my point entirely.
>Why are we considering all "start up" situations as "full boot" scenarios?
>Why isn't focusing on suspend to disk scenarios a better win?
>
>  
>
    Software suspend seems to work well.  I wouldn't be suprised if it 
has problems at the 1-in-20 level.

    A major reason for rebooting is to put the machine into a clear 
state.  I have some Linux desktops that are trouble-free (reboot for 
kernel upgrades,  power failures) but I've got some that have problems.  
For instance,  I've got one machine that sometimes loses the USB mouse 
after I unplug the USB speakers -- maybe it's a hardware problem or 
maybe a software problem...  It doesn't happen all that often,  but when 
I do,  a reboot fixes it.

    It would be horrible to suspend the machine in a bad state and then 
bring it back up in a bad state.  I suppose that you could work out an 
emacs-like scheme where we boot the machine,  then dump an image of the 
machine that lets us bring the machine back to a clean-boot state.

>I'm not arguing that.. I'm arguing that most day to day startup
>situations do not have to be "full boot" situations they could be
>"recover from suspend" and avoid service startup completely.
>
>  
>
    I won't argue with that.  My guess is that the problems in getting 
that working at the 1-in-1000 level are worse than getting parallel boot 
to work at 1-in-10000.  A next-gen init should be flexible enough that 
it can support software suspend scenarios.

    Another concern I'd have for ordinary users is the UI -- as I've 
said,  I find myself baffled by commercial OSes that make it hard to 
turn off the machine (for instance,  "Log Out" is the easy menu item to 
hit on my Mac,  despite the fact that we've got one account that people 
actually log into and about 15 Unix accounts for various daemons the 
machine runs.)  Would ordinary users understand the difference between 
shutting down,  suspending and such?  I,  for one,  have learned to 
avoid all the "Suspend" and "Hibernate" options on Windows laptops,  
since these often wedge the machine,  forcing me to take the battery 
out...  I think we can do better with software suspend,  but confusion 
and bad UI could make a good feature into a curse.