Mandriva has done quite a lot of work on optimizing boot speed for its latest release, Mandriva Linux 2009. Frederic Crozat (head of the French engineering team) has written a blog post summarizing Mandriva's past work on this front, and the tweaks and improvements made for 2009. It shows that close analysis of inefficiencies in boot, and fixing 'small' bugs, can result in gains as large or larger than 'big picture' items like new initialization systems.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-11-17
Unfortunately, I believe it is already the case. They mostly use SysV init system, but it's rare to find 2 distros that use the same script to start a service and most of the time you can't use init scripts from distro to distros. And they don't even use the same commands to manage services (chkconfig for red hat, rc-update on gentoo, update-rc.d on debian and so on). I believe the init process is one of the main things that differenciate distros, along with the package manager.
Member since:2007-03-26
Maybe, but personally I see that as one of the selling points between different distros.
For example: I prefer BSD's init approach and when I need to fall back to linux, the distro I choose tends to be one with BSD influences (Slack, Arch, etc)
Member since:2005-07-06
Rahul: nothing discussed in Fred's blog is about creating an init system, it's about improving efficiency within an existing one.
Mandriva uses prcsys, which is mentioned in Fred's post. It's a very light parallel initialization system which is 100% compatible with SysV. All that's required for it to work is service dependency information embedded in the comments at the start of the initscripts themselves - which is actually a freedesktop standard. You can disable prcsys and use a conventional SysV boot by passing a single kernel parameter ('nopinit'). prcsys also transparently handles initscripts which don't have the dependency information added (i.e. completely conventional SysV initscripts).
Also, prcsys was there first. =) We've been using it since January 2006, rather before Ubuntu came up with upstart.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Indeed, Fedora do a lot of valuable work in the area. Everything is ultimately a collaboration, that's how open source works (ideally).
Of course, Xandros had a super-fast-boot system tailored to the Eee hardware before Arjan's work - it's what comes with the Eee. Claudio Matsuoka has been working on reimplementing, improving and extending Xandros's system since early this year, as the finit project: http://helllabs.org/finit/ .