Slashdot/IBM: How To Speed Up Linux Booting

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Michael Biebl]
> I don't think this is possible. upstart, initng and sysvinit et al
> have completely different paradigms (event based vs. dependency based
> vs chronological order).

Note that it is now trivial to make sysvinit dependency based, using
insserv and the LSB headers in the scripts.  The brave can try this

  # aptitude install insserv
  # BAD_INSSERV_HACKER=true dpkg-reconfigure insserv

If you answer 'yes' to the question about enabling the dependency
based boot, you get it. :)

It is not perfectly safe yet, as a lot of scripts are missing LSB
headers still, and some of them got wrong information in the headers
(as very few are testing their content).  The headers can be overriden
by editing /usr/share/insserv/overrides/ or adding files in
/etc/insserv/overrides/, until all scripts have correct headers.

The even braver can convert the boot system into running scripts in
parallel using

  echo CONCURRENCY=shell >> /etc/default/rcS

This again require all dependencies to be correct to make sure scripts
are still started in the correct order.

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen