hardware agnostic?

[Derek Broughton]

Rashkae wrote:

> Derek Broughton wrote:
> 
>> I'm not convinced of that - and Scott's info about what he's doing
>> suggests
>> otherwise.  hot-plugging everything as late as possible shortens the boot
>> time.
> 
> You would be shocked at how fast some of my old servers for which I
> compiled kernels boot... We're talking about hardware over 10 years old
> and it puts any modern desktop with ubuntu installed to shame.  System
> boots and is at a log in prompt before my desktop has even finished with
> intitramfs.

I wouldn't be _shocked_, but I mean that Scott's plans, heavily dependent on 
udev, involve simply _not_ loading any software that is not required to get 
X up and running.  Everything's geared to making X start as fast as 
possible.  So while you might be able to achieve the same thing by compiling 
a kernel for specific hardware, you can make it _look_ as if everything is 
loaded just as fast by waiting for the really intensive applications to 
settle down before you load other things.  I guess I really wasn't "not 
convinced" that you could speed up boot by compiling the kernel, but that I 
wasn't convinced it was either the only, or necessarily even the best, way.
> 
> Alas, I have discovered with age and wisdom, after having gone through
> "look how leet my fast booting linux boxes are" phase, that having
> systems (and backps thereof) which can be ported to any hardware
> 'agnosticly' on a moments notice trumps boot time.

LOL.  Even on my development system, there's much to be said for running 
certain services as VMs - for exactly the same reason.
-- 
derek