Thought about speeding up startup...

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 17:26 -0400, Michael S. Jessop wrote:
> ...well, I ran it by someone else first, and they said I didn't sound
> like a total fool... so I'll just cut and paste my original message here
> and see what people think... be nice.  :)
> 
> > In regards to Hotplug and long startups... would it be possible to
> > preconfigure the hardware (hotplug it once, record the results and
> > somehow make the results static) at installation?  You would, of
> course,
> > have to allow for manual scanning of hardware and changes that would
> > require modules to be loaded or not, and also a way to to it with
> > upgrades or installations (flag stuff somehow)?

The actual scanning of hardware that occurs when hotplug runs is fairly
fast - it's able to use information that the kernel already has. The
delay is in loading the drivers, rather than anything else. The most
significant problem with hotplug is the way it insists on trying to load
drivers that aren't actually appropriate for the hardware - making
hotplug more intelligent about what it tries would be a useful
improvement.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org