SoC boot project weekly summary week #3/14

[Carlos Villegas]

Hi, on Petter's request I will start a weekly summary in parallel to the 
blog (which will be updated in a daily basis). This summary accounts for 
the third week since the projet was accepted (8-14 June).

This third week I looked at the woody, sarge and etch releases from 
Debian. They were installed with KDE (with autologin) and bootchart. The 
results were 32 sec for woody, 44 sec for sarge and 34 sec for Etch 
...(sid results go here)... Nevertheless, it seems that bootchart stops 
logging before you're actually logged in to KDE. An approach to solve 
this is to modify bootchart such that it stops until a program specified 
in kdm PostSession. The current results are available in 
(http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/bootcharts.html).

Nevertheless, I didn't keep any log of the installation procedure while 
just accepting all the default configuration (except for using always 
KDE). I'll keep a log on the future to  evaluate and understand the 
difference in boot times.

Besides, I looked at the SUSE, Mandriva and Fedora distributions to 
analyse their boot process. The most interesting so far has been  SUSE 
being LSB compliant and having insserv/startpar to set and ajust the 
dependencies for parallalel booting. rcorder in FreeBSD does something 
similar although it seems to do check dependencies in two stages during 
the boot (with root fs and with all mounted filesystems) and does not 
support runlevels. Fedora looks like a regular sysvinit  process 
although it contains LSB information in the initscripts that is read by 
chkconfig to set dependencies in the /etc/rc<X>.d directories. 
Nevertheless, the dependencies don't adjust to added/substracted 
scripts. Ubuntu distribution looks to be very similar to debian but with 
readahead. On the other hand, Sun's SMF self heal system seems to be 
implemented with Ubuntu in the NexentaOS 
(http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki/Nexenta_OS) but haven't looked at it. 
Finally Mandriva 2006 doesn't seem to have pinit/prcsys in their default 
configuration so it seems to have a standard sysvinit.

Finally, the deliverable is being written in latex (with pdf and html 
versions generated together) using svn for version control. It is 
currently available at 
(http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/deliverable1/index.html) 
and will be ready for review this sunday evening (GMT time).

Well, hope to have your feedback

carlos


-- 

Carlos Villegas
----------------------------------------
Hamilton Institute
NUIM, Maynooth, Co. Kildare
Ireland
Tel: +353 1 708 6458
Fax: +353 1 708 6269
www.hamilton.ie/cemacs