Deliverable 4: Proposed boot process is available for review (SoC2006)

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Carlos Villegas]
> Hi, the deliverable 4 with a proposed boot process is available now on:
> http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/deliverable4.html
>
> It contains a proposal based on:
> *Dash as /bin/sh,
> *Readahead mostly focused on KDE,
> *Hwclock on the backgroud,

I mentioned earlier that it is risky to put hwclock in the background.
And it is.  I did some testing with that on a spare machine I have
available, and a lot of strange stuff happened when ntpdate and
hwclock*.sh messed the clock back and forth.

But it is less risky to remove the calls to hwclock*.sh.  If I
understood my recent discoveries correctly, the i386 kernel normally
sets its internal clock without help, so there is no need to run
hwclockfirst.sh and hwclock.sh.  So instead of putting it in the
background, try to just add 'exit 0' after 'start)' in both scripts.
On my system, this dropped the boot from 44 to 20 seconds.

I also tried to put the networking script in the background, but this
made ntpdate fail because the DNS server were unavailable.

> The total time decreased reached so far is of 8 seconds.

I am curious about the effect if you just drop hwclock*.sh, either
with the 'exit 0' trick, or just by removing them from rcS.d/.

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen