On Tue, 27 Nov 2012, Trent W. Buck wrote:
Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:33:31AM +1100, Trent W. Buck wrote:
Apropos, this just appeared on LWN: http://web.dodds.net/~vorlon/wiki/blog/Upstart_in_Debian/
compared to sysvinit+startpar, systemd improves boot time by 1.1 seconds, and upstart improves it by 0.62 seconds.
To be fair, that is a VM with a minimal install. I bet if you installed NetworkManager and pulseaudio, systemd's speed gain would jump to as much as five seconds ;-)
Personally I liked minit/cinit's approach -- "config files? What is that?" -- you had something like
/etc/minit/smbd/exec -> /usr/sbin/smbd /etc/minit/smbd/args /etc/minit/smbd/depends/nmbd
where "args" is newline-delimited list of arguments. You could just about use xattrs, and avoid ever open a file at all.
Oh, and if you can't do it in a one-liner, your exec symlink is to a sh shebang script (or whatever the hell else you want).
Allegedly it was inspired by qmail's config format -- I can't comment on that. It certainly makes sense to me to avoid heavyweight parsing when your init's target environment is ucLinux-level embedded systems (as at about eight years ago).
The "boot stuff" was discussed on FreeBSD mailing lists many times. I just revisited some and found an own mail related to it.. back in 2008. Here some summary: - In many cases boots are not frequent (servers running continuously, sleep/resume szenarios) - BIOS+kernel boot account for more than 50% of overall time on a desktop - kernel can be made faster by avoiding probes for devices unneeded at boot (e.g. USB if you do not want to boot of a USB) A customized kernel helps in embedded systems a lot - You can speed up rc parsing significantly by using SSDs (And if you like, just use a smaller SSD for the root partition) In general: there is always a faster boot medium - No, you don't want to restart a service that died If a service dies you want to know about it and investigate why - Parallel startups add problems and save 15-20% of "rc time" if you include BIOS+kernel it is typically below 10% of overall boot All in all there was nobody convincing enough to make another boot process than traditional init/rc the _default_ for FreeBSD. Of course you are free to roll your own if you want, and alternatives exist, e.g. OpenRC used by Gentoo. Personally, I still enjoy the ability to see all relevant information under /etc/rc.conf:-)
Lennart cares *Linux* not unix. Debian kfbsd and Debian GNU can FOAD as far as he's concerned.
In the case of Gnome, this attitude made it harder for the FreeBSD project to implement and support Gnome (and I guess Solaris has the same problem). It adds to the Gnome fragmentation and less contribution goes in every "Gnome derivate". BTW: It is interesting to hear what people say about Windows 8, especially desktops using a GUI designed for tablets. I thought the same about Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Fortunately under Unix/Linux we can choose the GUI:-) Regards Peter