Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 6th Oct 2006 20:28 UTC, submitted by Görkem Çetin
"For a long time, Linux has been blamed to boot slowly, compared to other modern operating systems. In this article, we are going to focus on a new init system we developed for our Pardus Linux distribution, Mudur, together with other initiatives that are worth mentioning. Mudur is written from scratch in Python with simplicity, speed and maintainability in mind. It isn't a replacement for the /sbin/init command like some other alternatives, nor just a parallel script executor. Mudur greatly simplified our boot process, making it faster and more flexible. Authors look forward for future boot process research for further improvement and optimizations."
Thread beginning with comment 169499
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-12-31
Wrong init replacement?
The problem isn't that we do not have plentyful of really, really good solutions as how to solve paralel boot process. We can run them in paralel, we can satisfy dependencies, we can go event-driven, all this has been thought of and done.
What is the real issue then?
The real problem is the huge momentum sysv init scripts system has. You have thousands and thousands of applications basically conforming to one standard approach; a dumb shellscript taking parameters in argv and starting stuff accordingly.
What's wrong with this?
Firstly, shell sucks, performance-wise. We all know it. Of course, this part belongs to the Utopia land, but it'd be really nifty if it was rewritten to some saner language, preferably nothing like perl or python (which are just too impractical if they need 1MiB+ to work).
Second, linear startup sucks, too; we all know it and that's why we want paralel startup, obviously. However, paralel startup won't - ever - work with the current setup. Therefore, no matter what init system wins the general popularity contest in the wild, the init scripts will have to be adjusted. All of them, or at least all that are generally used. Can you imagine the ammount of manhours necessary?
Now imagine a whole distribution migrating... I am not saying it's not possible, I'm saying it's a huge pain in the ass and you've got to get a lot of people pulling together in one direction, which is something you do not see often in the world of opensource in general and Linux in particular.