Speeding up the boot process

[Steve Flynn]

Brian McKee wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 5:14 AM, Steve Flynn <anothermindbomb at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> the same sequence number, I made the change to
>>
>> CONCURRENCY=shell
>>     
>
> Is your laptop a dual core machine?  I saw that note somewhere, but
> was under the impression that it takes a multicore/processor machine
> to get any advantage out of it, thus my Atom processor wouldn't make
> it worthwhile for me....
>   

The laptop is indeed dual-core.

However, I would expect that it'll work in the same way that compiling 
with "make -j 5" (for example) does, even on a single core machine.... 
you fire off multiple scripts / compiles because you can make use of the 
dead time when one thread it waiting for a disk read or write to 
complete by running other code, probing for hardware, waiting for the 
router to hand out a DHCP address and so forth.

Back in the mid 90's when it took me 9 or 10 hours to cross compile the 
kernel for a motorola 68030, I used to kick off multiple threads despite 
having a single core processor and slashed an hour or two off the 
cross-compile time.

Of course, depending on the spec of your machine, how many scripts run 
concurrently, how fast your drives are and a number of other things, the 
amount of time gained (or lost) is a matter for investigation. Suck it 
and see - if the boot times don't improve or you see any other issues, 
set the level of concurrency back to "none" and you're back to where you 
started.