Alternative Init System

[Tristan Wibberley]

Lee Revell wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-02-26 at 16:29 -0600, Rocco Stanzione wrote:
>> I'd be surprised if this hasn't been brought up before, but since I haven't 
>> seen it I'd like to mention it here.  My experience with supervisor-style 
>> init systems, specifically runit-run, has left me with the opinion that the 
>> sysV system has served its purpose and is ready to be replaced.  I spend a 
>> lot of time on the support channels on IRC and I'd say startup times are 
>> among the top 20 complaints I see.
> 
> Have you tried Dapper?  It boots WAY faster than Breezy, I have not
> timed it but it feels almost as fast as XP.

I've seen a marginal improvement only - time till bootchart shows 
gdmgreeter stops using CPU: 45-50s (breezy) -> 35-40s (dapper).

IMHO, runlevels should be maintained as lists of sets of programs that 
should be running within that runlevel, but a dependency chain should 
also be used, so you can still have a GUI-less runlevel, a single user 
runlevel, etc, all using dependencies.

I also think simply making startup scripts depend on others is not 
finegrained enough. For example, gdmgreeter can do much of its work (eg, 
displaying the greeting screen) before the pam backend has started, so 
gdm should not have to wait for LDAP just in case pam is configured to 
use that for logins. Rather libpam should cause gdmgreeter to wait for 
LDAP if it is so configured that way, which would mean gdmgreeter should 
just go ahead and start anyway.

-- 
Tristan