I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the +people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we +could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu +funded +developer +gathering. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future +of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot +issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more +asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and +upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.
+ +Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot +process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick +boot:
+ +-
+
+
- Use dash as /bin/sh. + +
- Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware + clock is in UTC. + +
- Install and activate the insserv package to enable + dependency + based boot sequencing, and enable concurrent booting. + +
Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to +unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds +from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency +declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases +where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start +using this.
+ +On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was +introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the +startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently +from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be +possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test +this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/; +insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)
+ +