"Apart from a KDE desktop and applications, the developers of the Pardus 2007 Linux distribution have built an entire distribution from scratch. Pardus, released last month, has its own multilingual installer, custom dependency-resolving package manager, and an INIT system that slashes boot times by several seconds. The distribution has come a long way since its first release in 2005, when it was based on Gentoo and lacked a package manager. Thanks to its custom tools, it's one of the easiest Linux distribution to run and manage."
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Member since:2006-04-28
When I tested it I found the first boot after installation quite slow (like a minute or more), but subsequent boots were fast (about 35 seconds). In the same range as Debian Etch or Arch Linux in my box.
I wouldn't say it's a dramatic improvement over other init systems, but it does boot fast.
Member since:2005-07-08
I read the whitepaper they wrote on Mudur (just about the only English technical documentation they have), and it looks pretty cool. Essentially they take everything out of /etc/inittab and just have it start their Python script. The usual init still manages daemons, and they have a small daemon written in C that manages service configurations.
They do some smart things besides parallelism. For example, instead of sleeping for a moment after starting a service to give it time to open its communications channels (sockets, ports, etc.), they poll on them and start dependent services immediately after they come up.
They also have some smart remarks concerning Ubuntu's Upstart. We already have a powerful event-driven resource manager in udev, so why not use it? It seems like they really put some thought into this and came to some interesting conclusions.
As for Python, they say it takes a second or two to load the interpreter and libraries into memory, and from there it's really fast. Using a high-level language allowed them to trim their 10,000-line shell-based init system to a svelte 1,500 lines of Python.
If we would only give it a shot, Python could turbocharge the free software community. Not only is it easier to write, but it's easier to understand, maintain, and extend. Reinventing so many pieces of a distribution seems like hard work, but they really didn't have to write that much code to accomplish their goals.
Member since:
2005-07-13
The Mudur service loader seems very cool, I'm having a little difficulty reconciling the concept of a python-based service loader to speed things up, but their logic seems sound enough and it doesn't seem overly complex.
Can anyone confirm in real-world use if it has a dramatic improvement in bootup?